‘Flashing Red’

As the Trump administration openly defies a federal court order restoring access for CNN, MS Now, and Politico, the White House press corps needs to hold its nerve.

On Thursday morning, as President Donald Trump welcomed Xi Jinping, the president of the People’s Republic of China, to the White House, CNN’s Betsy Klein said she was turned away three times from the gates; MS Now’s Laura Barrón-López said Secret Service agents confiscated her pass. “I went to the Press Pass Security Hut,” Barrón-López said, but after tapping her badge and entering her PIN, “it started flashing red.” Klein and Barrón-López were among the journalists from CNN, MS Now, and Politico whom Trump had arbitrarily ejected from the White House a few days earlier, but on Thursday around 1am ET, Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the US District Court for the District of Columbia had issued a court order countering Trump’s ban and mandating the reinstatement of press access for fourteen days while litigation continues. Klein and Barrón-López eventually got into the White House around noon, but their difficulties had already resulted in a baffling situation, as Dana Bash noted on CNN, in which “Chinese state-run media is in the Oval Office and, until moments ago, the American media—part of a free press inside this wonderful democracy we live in—was not there.”