White House restores banned outlets' access under court order, then calls them fake news anyway.

…(cont) By Saturday the reporters were back inside, credentials in hand, and a reporter at the gaggle asked the president about the ban he had just been forced to reverse. "No, no," he said. "I want real news. Not fake news like you." The order had worked exactly as written. Or it hadn't — not in the sense that counts, because the sentence undid the order's meaning in real time, on tape, two days after the ruling that produced it.

That same Saturday, on Truth Social, the president wrote that the country had "the BEST FINANCIAL NUMBERS EVER" and that the "FAKE NEWS MEDIA refuses to report them" — a complaint about coverage aimed at outlets he had spent the prior week trying to keep from covering him at all.

The Hill's own accounting of the week put it plainly: the moment that mattered wasn't the state dinner with Xi Jinping, "magnificent" as the president called the arrival. It was the arrival itself, and how sparse he judged the coverage of it. He wants the audience. He does not want the audience's questions.

The outlets he wants least were never the only ones who noticed.

The order held. The president's opinion of the reporters it covers did not move, and by his own account never intended to. What moved was the White House's ability to keep them out — for one morning, in open violation, and not since.