Major Garrett Hammers Trump Over ‘Spat’ With the Associated Press: ‘It Makes Him Look Weak’
CBS News’s Chief Washington Correspondent Major Garrett hammered President Donald Trump’s ongoing banning of Associated Press reporters from White House events during a panel discussion with NOTUS this week. NOTUS, a political news start-up from the Allbritton Journalism Institute, held a livestream discussion following Trump’s address to Congress this week, which featured Garrett, Fox’s Bret Baier, Politico’s Dasha Burns, the Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey, and others.
Garrett pulled no punches in analysis of the president placing restrictions on the AP’s White House access. “The spat with the AP fundamentally makes the president look much weaker than I think he realizes,” Garrett began, adding:
He doesn’t need to keep the AP out. Come on. That is undercutting everything he said last night about removing censorship and government control over speech and access. And now the white House will find itself trying to dial this in and out.
And I think for a while they’ll like it. But I think over a while. Based on my knowledge of the president, he’ll get bored with it because it makes him look weak.
During Trump’s Wednesday night address he declared, “I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.”
The New York Times, to Garrett’s point, offered a fact check of the claim. “Mr. Trump signed an executive order purporting to protect free speech, but he has taken a number of other actions that arguably curtail speech. The White House has barred The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One for declining to use the term Gulf of America,” noted the Times, adding:
He threatened this week to pull federal funding from schools that “allow illegal protests,” a move condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union as an infringement on the First Amendment. And civil rights groups have sued over his efforts to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which they say chill speech.
Watch the clip above.
