Kim Jong Un stared blankly as I spoke.
The North Korean dictator was seated across a small table from President Donald Trump, the two leaders and their entourages tucked away in a meeting room of a luxury hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam. It was their second summit, this one in February 2019—an event the United States hoped would de-escalate the threat posed by the rogue nuclear nation and one that Trump had told aides might yield him a Nobel Peace Prize. But I wanted to ask the president about something on the other side of the globe.
“Mr. President, do you have any reaction to Michael Cohen and his testimony?” I asked from a few feet away.
Trump scowled and shook his head. Kim didn’t react. The dozen other American reporters who were there and I were abruptly pulled from the room. And when the summit later adjourned without a deal, Trump blamed the stalled negotiations on the distractions caused by Cohen, his former lawyer, who had appeared before a Democratic-led congressional committee back in Washington hours earlier and delivered explosive testimony in which he labelled Trump a “racist,” “con man,” and “cheat.”
Trump later told aides on Air Force One that he didn’t like my question. And, certainly, he had the right to respond to it however he saw fit or to choose not to respond at all. But most important was that I had the ability to ask it at all—that a journalist, protected by the freedom of speech, could directly challenge the president about any subject of his or her choosing.
I was able to do so that day only because I was part of what’s known as the White House press pool. Established during the Eisenhower administration, the pool is a small, rotating group of journalists who stand in for the rest of the press corps when security or space limitations prevent a larger number of reporters and photographers from being present—for example, in the Oval Office, on Air Force One, or in this case, in a small room in Vietnam. Across generations of Democratic and Republican presidencies, the pool system has, with remarkable speed, kept the American public informed about what the president is doing on a daily basis.
In his first term, Trump went along with the system. But this week he made clear that he no longer would: The White House press secretary announced that the administration would disband the daily rotation, long coordinated by the White House Correspondents’ Association, and instead hand-pick which journalists would be allowed to follow the president.
That change might seem trivial to many Americans—just a Beltway-insider controversy or a fight between celebrity correspondents jockeying over who has access to the president. But it represents a dangerous moment for American democracy. If, as it has begun to do, the White House gives preference to Trump-friendly outlets, it will restrict the ability of fair, independent journalists to hold some of the most powerful people on the planet to account and to expose the president’s actions and decisions.
“Our job is to push the president beyond his comfort space to respond to questions that otherwise they’re never asked,” Peter Baker, the longtime New York Times correspondent who has covered the White House since 1996, told me. “Now he’s sending a signal that If you write something we don’t like, you’re out. You don’t get to be here anymore.”
The announcement this week follows the White House’s recent banishment of the Associated Press from the pool and White House events after the outlet refused to go along with Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” AP journalists have been allowed to keep their hard passes, security clearances that allow them access to the White House campus. But they are clearly being punished by the president for the words they use to cover him. The White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents the journalists who report on the day-to-day doings of the president and works with the West Wing to facilitate press access, objected to the decision. The AP, in a statement, said the move “plainly violates the First Amendment” and is suing the White House over the ban; a federal judge this week did not offer an immediate ruling but also did not restore the outlet’s access, causing the Trump administration to claim “victory.” (I worked at the AP for eight years, including while on that presidential trip to Vietnam, and am a member of the WHCA.)
By overriding the entire pool system, the White House has now gone one step further. The WHCA represents nearly 300 news organizations—from a wide range of ideological viewpoints, including conservative ones—that are accredited to cover the president. It has long determined the identities of the outlets and reporters in the pool with no input from the White House. About three dozen outlets rotate, on an alphabetical basis, pool duties at the White House; a smaller number participate in what’s known as the travel pool, following the president when he leaves White House grounds, because of the costs involved. (The media organizations themselves cover those costs, not taxpayers.) When he travels, 13 journalists—a mix of correspondents, photographers, and technicians—go along with him (because that’s how many seats are in the press cabin of Air Force One). When the president is at the White House, the number increases slightly. In both cases, those in the pool send out information through reports that are distributed directly to the other members of the WHCA.
On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the White House would no longer use the WHCA’s rotation. The next day, Reuters joined AP in losing its scheduled shift; Blaze Media, a conservative outlet making its debut in the pool, and Axios—one of the few outlets to adopt the “Gulf of America” name—were allowed in. Today, two more partisan, right-leaning outlets—One America News and The Federalist—received pool slots. And a reporter from the Russian state news agency TASS was allowed to gain access to today’s Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while the AP and Reuters were not. That reporter was later removed by staffers for “not being on the approved list,” according to the White House.
“This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” Eugene Daniels, the president of WHCA’s board and a Politico correspondent soon leaving to host an MSNBC show, said in a statement earlier this week. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
The mere presence of the pool is important; its reporters stand poised at just about any moment to provide the nation with real-time updates on the president’s actions and health. The pool is there if the president travels to Boston or Beijing or just up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. It has been on hand for some of the nation’s most historic moments, including when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas and when George W. Bush was scrambled into the Florida skies after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center. It has been there when presidents made unannounced trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. And it’s there for mundane moments too, with reporters sometimes sitting for hours in vans while the president golfs.
The pool’s purpose is not just stenography about what the president says or a daily diary of what he does. Pool reports, compiled by independent journalists and untouched by any government officials, are often full of answers to unsparing questions posed by pool reporters. Trump feeds off media attention and, at times, enjoys going back and forth with reporters. He is accessible to the press and answers far more questions than his immediate predecessors. But most of the questions he fields are in spontaneous sessions with members of the pool, in the Oval Office, in the Cabinet room, or on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. He takes far fewer questions in larger news-conference settings with the full press corps, and he doesn’t regularly sit for one-on-one interviews other than with friendly, right-leaning interlocutors.
If the pool is now stacked with right-wing journalists, Trump will face fewer challenging questions, a blow to transparency and Americans’ ability to keep tabs on the most powerful person in their government. Ron Fournier, who covered the White House for the AP for more than a decade beginning in 1993, described such a system to me as “state media.”
“That is not a democracy,” Fournier said. “If this precedent holds, every future president will want the same deal.”
The changes to the pool system are all the more worrying because they are part of a larger attack on the press from the White House. No president likes his media coverage, but no one before Trump has made the press such a part of the story. Trump has long deemed journalists “the enemy of the people” while deriding institutions and individual reporters (me included), and he has successfully inspired fear in the Fourth Estate. His litigation prompted ABC to pay $15 million to his presidential library in a settlement. His FCC has opened investigations into PBS, NPR, and the parent company of NBC. Trump threatened this week to sue members of the media over anonymous sources, claiming that “a big price” should be paid for stories he doesn’t like. The Pentagon has told reporters that it will eliminate its own pool that travels with the Defense secretary. And before taking office, Trump’s FBI director mused about targeting journalists he believes have covered the president unfairly.
The WHCA circulated a letter this week that was signed by 39 outlets protesting the changes to the pool. Some right-leaning organizations, such as Fox News and Newsmax, signed the letter, warning that a future Democratic president might exclude conservative media outlets. Newsmax’s owner, Chris Ruddy, made that case to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt yesterday, a person familiar with the meeting told me. Leavitt was unmoved by the argument, the person said. (Ruddy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) She has stated publicly that the changes to the pool will allow a more diverse set of outlets to cover the president. In response to a social-media post from Baker, the New York Times correspondent, criticizing the move, Leavitt wrote, “Gone are the days where left-wing stenographers posing as journalists, such as yourself, dictate who gets to ask what.”
Members of the WHCA board continued negotiations with the White House yesterday. Reporters have speculated that Trump will get bored of softball questions from friendly outlets or that the White House will tire of shouldering the logistics of staging press events without the WHCA’s help. Some of the White House correspondents I have talked to in recent days have floated the idea of boycotting covering Trump events in protest, but others, including members of TV networks, have pushed back on the idea. Among the fears: that a boycott could cause the White House to fully stock the pool with sycophantic outlets, or to disband it completely.
Some rank-and-file WHCA members have also advocated for canceling the White House Correspondents’ dinner, the annual black-tie celebration of the First Amendment scheduled for late April, because of the bad optics that would be produced by scenes of correspondents mingling with administration officials who have cut back on press access. But calling off the event would deprive the organization of its best yearly opportunity to raise money for journalism scholarships and operating expenses. For now, the dinner is on.
Although presidents are always invited, Trump did not attend the event during any of his first four years in office. A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, told me that Trump had not decided whether to attend this year’s dinner, but that many of his aides were urging him to go—“to make clear that he owns you.”
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