"Never admit fault. Always counterattack."
That was the advice lawyer Roy Cohn gave Donald Trump in the 1970s, when Trump was a 27-year-old real estate developer. Sued over allegations of racial discrimination, Trump followed Cohn's counsel and filed a countersuit, shifting the dynamics of the case. Some 50 years later, U.S. President Donald Trump still deals with the press the same way. Once a man who used the media to shape public opinion in his favor, he has grown increasingly adversarial toward it.
Reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico have had their White House access suspended, Bloomberg reported on the 20th. The move came a day after Trump said he would remove those outlets, which have run coverage critical of his administration and the Republican Party, from the White House. The same day, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump cited The New York Times and The Washington Post as examples of "fake news" and signaled further action.
It was not the first such ban. In 2018, CNN reporter Jim Acosta had his press credentials suspended after clashing with Trump at a news conference. The administration also restricted access for The Associated Press after the news agency defied a directive to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Major outlets labeled "anti-Trump," including the Times and NBC, were told to vacate their workspaces at the Pentagon press area.
The counterattack tactics Trump learned from Cohn first took the form of exploitation. He aggressively used the media as a vehicle to package and promote himself. In the 1980s, he posed as his own spokesman under the alias "John Barron," personally feeding reporters flattering information about himself. Reporters at the time knew Barron was Trump but looked the other way because he made good copy, and a kind of symbiotic relationship took hold.
The cracks appeared in the 1990s, when the bankruptcy of his Taj Mahal casino and his divorce drew heavy coverage. As negative stories piled up, Trump grew more critical of the press, planting the seeds of the open hostility that would follow.
Starting with his 2016 presidential bid, launched in 2015, he began in earnest to brand mainstream outlets critical of him as "fake news," a strategy aimed at eroding their credibility. It rallied his base and recast unfavorable coverage as the work of an "enemy of the people." At the same time, he made active use of right-leaning outlets outside the mainstream, such as Breitbart. Led by figures including Steve Bannon, Breitbart served as a megaphone that carried Trump's message unfiltered, giving him a channel to speak directly to supporters without going through the mainstream press. It was, in effect, the forerunner of Truth Social, his own social media platform.
During his presidency, the distrust and attempts at control became more overt. He suspended White House access for reporters whose coverage he disliked and signed an executive order directing that federal funding be cut off for public broadcasters NPR and PBS, which he accused of a liberal bias. A federal court later ruled that the funding cutoff was unconstitutional.
Even so, the Trump administration is tightening its grip. It has moved to halt public broadcasting funding entirely and to restrict access for outlets critical of the government. While maintaining active communication with relatively friendly outlets such as Fox News and Axios, it has taken a harder line with other mainstream organizations. Analysts see this as more than an emotional reflex: a strategy to shore up Trump's political standing and mobilize his base. Posting dozens of messages on Truth Social whenever an issue arises is another part of the Trump playbook for weakening the media's influence.
