White House reporters for MS NOW, CNN and Politico are back in the White House as of midday Thursday, after days of being barred entry because President Trump said the news outlets “purposely write negative news.”
In a ruling issued shortly after midnight, U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly for the District of Columbia granted a 14-day temporary restraining order to CNN, MS NOW and Politico, which had press credentials of their journalists covering the White House revoked on Saturday.
Yet early on Thursday, the news outlets said some of their journalists were denied entry to the White House. They asked the court for an immediate hearing. Kelly gave the Trump administration until 12:30 p.m. ET to respond.
In a declaration filed shortly before that deadline, Micah Stopperich, the director of White House press operations, says his team began to work on restoring access after receiving word at 7:10 a.m. The job took just under three hours to complete.
Earlier story, POLITICO, CNN, MS NOW barred from White House after court ruling restoring access - https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/24/politico-barred-from-white-house-after-court-ruling-restoring-access-01091263 (arc)
Was it all a ruse to build demand for state media? Or was the admin simply too incompetent to forsee this outcome?
I would strongly bet on incompetence, I think Trump just threw a dumbass narcissistic temper tantrum and lashed out at these organizations because he’s a cornered rat and he knows it and his lawyers just had to scramble to put the best presentation on it they could, which got laughed out of court because they’re a bunch of idiots trying to justify the actions of an even bigger idiot
Hanlon’s razor is an adage or rule of thumb that states, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
To be fair, that is a general rule because actual malice is rarer than incompetence/ stupidity. In Trump’s case, he is demonstrably malicious and stupid. So it’s hard to say which it sometimes. Probably both.
How is this a bad outcome for Trump? He’s wasting a lot of resources for those news outlets that hang to fight this
All they got was a 14 day access order, which the Trump admin did not even initially honor, costing the outlets even more time and resources
Wasting his administration’s own resources just as much as everyone else involved is, except he’s wasting resources for a losing effort. Also I’m pretty sure like five different non-profit media advocacy organizations jumped in to represent these networks and did the heavy lifting for them, so really they just got free advertising out of this.
Which is almost certainly going to be extended within 14 days, so it’s effectively a permanent access order
Using ressources for what you want to do (demolishing democracy in this case) is no waste.
It’s not like this administration is using any ressources on anything else anyway… well, maybe with the exception of enriching themselves.
This, plus it makes the courts look corrupt to his supporters.
B.