An all-out confrontation between President Trump and the media escalated Monday, as three banned outlets launched a legal fight, Trump compared some reporting to “cancer,” and five major TV networks came together to announce a de facto boycott of White House pool coverage. It’s a remarkable sequence of events that began with Trump’s…
Page A2From§Eachthe noon edition — 27 September 2026
President spends Xi state dinner insulting the reporters a judge just ordered him to let back in.
As it ran on the front
The West Wing had a lawyer's answer this week, and it lasted about as long as it took a camera to find him.
On Friday the 18th, three outlets went dark inside the briefing room: CNN, MS NOW, Politico, banned outright. By Monday the 21st, per The Hill, all three had sued, the president had compared some of the reporting to "cancer," and five major television networks announced they would stop covering the pool alone rather than cross a line three of their competitors could not — five networks, not three, standing beside three outlets, not folded into them.…
…(cont) The West Wing's answer, that same Thursday, was to deny the three outlets' reporters entry anyway — a violation the wire services filed while it was still unfolding, hours after the ruling. That Thursday was also, by The Hill's own account, the day Xi Jinping and his wife, Peng Liyuan, arrived for the state dinner, the day the president called their arrival "magnificent" on social media and, in the same post, complained about the size of the press pool he had just refused to let back in.
A reporter at the next 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 badge had been returned. The sentence about the outlet wearing it had not moved an inch.
The Hill's own headline names what this bought: a media fight loud enough to overshadow a state dinner with China's premier Xi Jinping, under a midterms clock that does not stop for either. The president spent the visit itself insulting the reporters the court had just ordered him to let back in.
A judge can order a badge handed back. He has no docket entry for what the president says days later, standing at a podium, to the reporter now holding it.
“This is the same trick every time: the order gets obeyed just long enough for the cameras, then the man goes right back to calling the referees fake. If access to the press only holds while it's being watched, it was never access — it was a photo op with a badge stapled to it.”
“Look, he complied — the court got exactly what it asked for, and nobody's access was actually blocked after Saturday. Calling it "fake news" is just his opinion, not policy, it's clearly a personal — did I say policy? That's not what I meant to say.”
Earlier in this story
- White House restores banned outlets' access under court order, then calls them fake news anyway. By Chip · the coffee break edition, 27 September 2026
The receipts
The key moment of President Trump’s week did not come at the state dinner with Chinese premier Xi Jinping nor as the two leaders toured the National Archives. It came instead on social media. On Thursday afternoon, Trump proclaimed the arrival of Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, as “magnificent”
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.