The Justice Department’s new argument: Trump is a snowflake
President Donald Trump defaulted to his usual spiel when he discussed the expulsion of the Associated Press from the White House press pool. The wire service’s Stylebook declined to adopt Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” “It’s called the Gulf of America now; it’s not called the Gulf of Mexico any longer,” said Trump in a Feb. 18 news conference, a week after the expulsion.
Piling on, the president also said that the AP has been “very, very wrong on the election, on Trump and the treatment of Trump,” an apparent reference to his defeat in the 2020 election. That, of course, was a lie.
The truth behind the sidelining of the AP, however, emerged from a hearing last Thursday at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In that charged forum, a Justice Department lawyer argued that Trump was a snowflake who needed safe spaces, free from entities like the fearsome AP. He didn’t use those terms, in fairness. But he came close, invoking the phraseology of the progressive left to bombard the First Amendment. It was quite a 2025 moment.
Related Knowledge Center: The White House vs. the press
Whether it’s the Des Moines Register’s publication of an unfavorable election poll, a routine edit of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, or the Associated Press’s decision in its authoritative stylebook to continue to use “Gulf of Mexico,” Donald Trump and the White House have used executive authority and legal reprisals in an effort to punish and suppress press coverage that runs contrary to the administration’s preferred narratives.
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