Trump Says He's Banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico From the White House

The three outlets say a ban would be unconstitutional, and their reporters kept working at the White House afterward.

President Donald Trump said he's banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, and that other news organizations would follow. He made the announcement in a social media post on Friday, September 18, 2026, and repeated it to reporters in the Oval Office a short time later, ABC7 Los Angeles reported. What the ban does in practice isn't clear.

Nothing visibly changed at the building. Correspondents for all three outlets were on the grounds Friday afternoon, taping live shots and walking in and out, and their passes appeared not to have been revoked, the outlet reported.

An announcement isn't a revocation, and by Friday afternoon it was still an announcement.

In the post, Trump wrote that news organizations shouldn't be allowed to report fiction and lies about the president, his administration or the country. He said the timing came down to what he called cumulative stories. In the Oval Office he told reporters he supports a free press but wants a fair and honest one, and that negative coverage doesn't buy anyone a spot inside.

“But I don't have to let them into my, into the people's house," he said, per <a href="https://abc7.com/story/trump-says-he-is-banning-cnn-msnow-politico-white-house/19848126/">ABC7's account of the remarks. Asked whether he was trying to intimidate the press, he said no.

CNN, in a statement carried in that report, said it stands behind its White House team and its reporting, and that the network has a constitutional right to do that work without government interference. If the threatened ban goes ahead, CNN said, it would be “an illegal assault on that fundamental and constitutionally-protected right.”

Politico said in a statement posted on X that it'll keep covering this White House and the ones after it, and that it will defend its First Amendment rights against any attempt to restrict them. The outlet also said Trump's claim Friday that it receives government subsidies is false and has already been debunked.

Jacqui Heinrich, president of the White House Correspondents' Association, said in a statement that the president himself described his planned action, in the Oval Office, as a ban on the free press. The stake, she wrote, is the public's right to an independent account of what whoever holds the office is doing.

There's precedent on both sides of this. During Trump's first term, the White House moved against then-CNN correspondent Jim Acosta's credentials; CNN sued to get them back, and the White House dropped the effort. Earlier in this term, the administration barred The Associated Press from the White House pool after the wire service wouldn't adopt the president's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

That case is still in litigation. As of Friday afternoon, no reporter from the three outlets named Friday had lost a pass.

Source: abc7.com, retrieved September 19, 2026.