The New Yorker:

The Associated Press had its day in court on Thursday, but free speech in this Presidency is already a big loser.

By Susan B. Glasser

Is there any stupider—or more revealing—scandal of the many that Donald Trump has already unleashed in his second term than the President’s sudden, arbitrary decision last month to ban the Associated Press from the White House press pool because its editors refused to go along with his whim to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America?

On Thursday morning, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, held a hearing in the A.P.’s lawsuit to block the President’s latest and arguably most flagrant ever transgression of the First Amendment in his effort to control coverage of himself. I would have liked to stay in my office to await the latest updates on Signalgate, which will surely rate as one of the capital’s other most stupidly revealing scandals, given that it was set off by Trump’s national-security adviser inadvertently inviting the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to join a text-message group chat about bombing Houthi rebels in Yemen. But Thursday’s hearing struck me as a good opportunity to watch one of the signature events in Trump’s Washington—a government lawyer embarrassing himself in defense of an almost laughably indefensible case.

Trump, in justifying his attack on the A.P., had left little room for avoiding the truth about his ban: it was pure retaliation for the organization making its own decisions about how to report on him. “We’re going to keep them out. Until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America,” Trump said last month. He called the A.P.—the all-American, middle-of-the-road, nonpartisan, always-there A.P.—a collection of “radical-left lunatics.” Perhaps even more worrisome, Trump has not confined his vengeance to the wire service; in seizing control of the press pool, Trump is challenging a prerogative of the White House press corps that goes back more than a century. It’s power he wants, not just petty retribution. As an unnamed Trump adviser summed up the case in an interview with Axios: “The AP and the White House Correspondents Association wanted to f--k around. Now it’s finding out time.”

Finding-out time is a good way of putting it; the bully in the White House is going to bully. The question is who, if anyone, is going to stop him. The A.P. made the quote the epigraph in its brief to Judge McFadden, seeking an emergency injunction.

In the hearing itself, nobody said anything about radical-left lunatics or the President’s absolute right to redraw the map of the world if he so chooses. Appearing for the government, Brian Hudak offered a subdued, if at times obtuse, defense. “There is no First Amendment right to access facilities by the press,” he said. I never heard him mention anything about the Gulf of Mexico, or the Gulf of America, for that matter. The A.P.’s lawyer, Charles Tobin, opted for a more straightforward point about what he called “viewpoint discrimination.” Trump’s White House has thrown up “unconstitutional retaliatory roadblocks” against the news agency, he said, which, if allowed to stand, will have a “chilling effect on the entire journalism industry.”

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