After a judge ruled that the White House violated [CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s] right to due process by stripping him of his press badge, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared that the administration was drawing up new rules to govern reporters’ behavior — and a process for booting them if those rules are broken.
“We have to create rules and regulations for conduct,” Trump told Chris Wallace in a Fox News Sunday interview, echoing Sanders’ announcement. “It’s not a big deal. If he misbehaves, we’ll throw him out or we’ll stop the news conference.”
“If they don’t listen to the rules and regulations,” he told reporters at a separate event at the White House, “we’ll end up back in court, and we’ll win.”
To reporters, the threatened new rules — which one person close to the White House said were in the works before the court ruling Friday — represent another obstacle to covering Trump, who views his battle with the media as an unambiguous positive with his conservative base. It was Trump and Sanders, after all, who escalated the Acosta situation after a dispute at a news conference by yanking his press pass and, to justify it, pointing to an apparently altered video of his interaction with a White House aide. Now, future legal encounters appear certain, as journalists deemed to have broken the rules are also likely to take the administration to court.
The situation is akin to having a “sword hanging over our heads,” said New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker. “It leaves this idea that they are going to be the judge of who gets to cover them based on some probably arbitrary criteria that they will be the only ones to determine.”
He added, “The idea that suddenly you’re going to try to determine who is polite enough to ask the president questions is just kind of ridiculous.”
‘A sword hanging over our heads’: Trump discovers new weapon against media
Sebastion Cooper 