President Donald Trump on Monday followed up his lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over last week's Jeffrey Epstein story by banishing one of the newspaper's reporters from Air Force One for an upcoming Scotland trip.
The moves reflect Trump's aggressive posture toward media who displease him — even a media magnate, Rupert Murdoch, with outlets that have been friendly to him in the past.
Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Journal and Murdoch on Friday because of the newspaper's article about a sexually suggestive letter bearing Trump's name that was included in a 2003 album compiled for alleged sex trafficker Epstein's birthday. The president has denied having anything to do with the note, which reportedly also included a salacious sketch.
On Monday, the White House said it was removing a Journal reporter from the pool covering the president's trip this weekend to his golf courses in Turnberry and Aberdeen in Scotland. The Journal's Tarini Parti had been scheduled to cover him on the trip.
“Due to the Wall Street Journal's fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
The Journal declined comment on the action.
The White House Correspondents' Association called the decision "deeply troubling."
“This attempt by the White House to punish a media outlet whose coverage it does not like is deeply troubling, and it defies the First Amendment. Government retaliation against news outlets based on the content of their reporting should concern all who value free speech and an independent media. We strongly urge the White House to restore the Wall Street Journal to its previous position in the pool and aboard Air Force One for the President's upcoming trip to Scotland," WHCA President Weijia Jiang, CBS News Senior White House Correspondent, said in a statement.
Trump has deployed an aggressive media strategy in the past.
It restricted the access of journalists from The Associated Press to press events when the news outlet would not change its style guidelines to reflect Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. That launched a legal battle that is wending its way through the courts.
The defamation lawsuit is another tool Trump has used against media outlets. He has sued CBS News for its editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with former opponent Kamala Harris; ABC News for a false statement made by George Stephanopoulos in a story regarding a New York writer who had accused Trump of sexual abuse; and Meta after it removed Trump's social media accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
In each of those cases, Trump won multimillion-dollar settlements. But in those instances, news was only one part of a major corporation's business. In the case of Murdoch and News Corp., news is the chief part of his business.
The Journal has vowed to fight.
It's also the first time Trump has sued for defamation as a sitting president, and it was not immediately clear whether any president has done that in the past.
Not every news organization has yielded without a fight. "60 Minutes" did some notably tough stories about the early days of Trump's second administration.
The Wall Street Journal leans conservative editorially, but hasn't been afraid to take Trump on in both its opinion and news sections. Other Murdoch outlets — Fox News Channel and the New York Post — are regarded by many observers as friendlier to the president, though they, too, have been known to challenge Trump.
Ever since the administration initially announced that it would not releae additional government files from the case against Epstein, factions of Trump's base supporters have turned on him. That has put some normally supportive news outlets in a difficult position.
Fox News largely avoided the story after Trump suggested his allies stop wasting time on it. But Fox's Howard Kurtz reported on The Wall Street Journal lawsuit on his “Media Buzz” show Sunday, saying that by doing so, “the president has drawn extra attention to the Journal's reporting.”
The president's battle with the press has taken on several dimensions. He has been fighting to take away government support for news organizations like Voice of America, and last week the Republican-controlled Congress voted to defund NPR and PBS.
Newsmax contributed to this report.
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