‘Walls are caving in’: Insider details how ‘terrible week’ set off Trump’s teeth-gnashing

A Washington, D.C., insider offered an explanation for President Donald Trump’s ban on three news outlets from the White House.

CNN, MS NOW and Politico have notified the 80-year-old president they’re filing a lawsuit after their reporters were blocked from the White House on Saturday after Trump said he would ban them over what he called “fake news,” and Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei told “CNN This Morning” what he believes set off the confrontation.

“The move, I think, is small, silly and stupid, right?” VandeHei sid. “It’s small in that it’s not going to make a damn bit of difference in terms of how people do their coverage. It’s stupid in that I don’t think it’s going to hold up in court, and I think eventually you’re going to have everyone just doing their job the way they should do it.”

“I hate the precedent of it, and the reason that it’s happening is the president feels the walls are caving in,” he added. “It was a terrible week for him last week. Everyone around him knows it.”

Host Audie Cornish was intrigued, and she asked him to elaborate.

“Because you’re increasing the Fed [interest] rate, you’re having the courts tell you you can’t do things that you want to do, you have a Republican congresswoman shooting an ad basically saying what Democrats have been saying about how he’s handling immigration,” VandeHei replied. “Like, that’s bad. Gas prices hit a new high, diesel hits a new high, inflation is high. Poll numbers are low, Republicans are in the tank, generics are bad.”

“Even the bubble he lives in, that’s a really bad bubble,” VandeHei added. “In every person that we talk to around him says you get the worst version of President Trump when he feels powerless and he feels powerless, and it’s kind of a taste of what’s to come because he is a lame-duck president, and he has defied political gravity in ways we’ve not seen other presidents. But political gravity is real. He has two plus years left in office. Republicans are looking at those polls, they’re thinking about survival. The media understands they’re bigger than one presidency – it’s going to last forever. The courts understand that they’re going to be judged based on the work that they do inside the courtroom, not whether the president is upset with the ruling.”