Networks resume Trump coverage a week after quitting over a CNN ban still in force.

…(cont) First Amendment, they said, unconstitutional, they said, and a federal judge agreed enough to order the access temporarily restored — not permanently, not unconditionally, temporarily, while the lawyers kept going. And then Thursday, the actual test arrived: Trump sat down with Xi Jinping, the kind of meeting the pool exists for, and CBS covered it the way you cover a thing you can't see — without the television pool, because the ban that started this whole boycott was still open for business. A federal judge's order and a presidential summit weren't enough to get CNN back in the room. The boycott held through that. The ban didn't move an inch.

Not because CNN got its seat back — it hasn't. Because, as the paper puts it, an indefinite suspension is "untenable." Untenable for whom is the only question worth asking. Not for the White House, which got exactly the outcome it wanted the moment it drew the line: CNN out, everyone else back in eventually, on a schedule of the walkout's own choosing.

This is the part nobody puts in the lede. A boycott that ends on a timer instead of a concession isn't a boycott anymore, it's a recess. The pool didn't win anything back for CNN. It won a week off for everybody else, and then it clocked back in. The ban outlasted the solidarity. That's not a coincidence, that's the design: keep the excluded outlet in litigation long enough, and the rest of the industry decides the show must go on — his show, on his terms, minus the one outlet he actually wanted gone.