When it comes to the First Amendment, Vice-President J.D. Vance is either dumb or full of crap, and he’s not dumb. Even as right-wing media outlets and legal experts have lambasted Donald Trump’s smashingly unconstitutional White House press ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, Vance and other bad-faith sycophants have argued that government policing of the media is not only appropriate but necessary to ensure some subjective, unmeasurable quantum of feel-good journalistic fluff. But that argument gets the First Amendment exactly backward and neatly illustrates why Trump’s press ban is all but certain to fail in the courts.

Pressed to explain his boss’s censorious temper tantrum, Vance whinged that “about 92 percent of the stories that they have on the president of the United States, on the administration, are negative … It’s not representative of public opinion.” The ban is “it’s about basic fairness,” the vice-president tsk-tsked. He promised that the targeted media organizations would be shut out of the White House “unless of course they start to behave like real news organizations.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed the talking point, blaming the outlets for “not honestly covering” the administration.

Unlike other recent efforts to suppress speech behind onion-skin-thin pretexts — the administration in 2025 effectively banned media outlets from the Pentagon for purported “security risks” when it was plainly about unfavorable substantive coverage — this time the motive is right out in the open. The president declared he was “banning” CNN, MS NOW, and Politico because they are “FAKE NEWS,” “one sided,” and “never good.” Trump celebrated — his own words here — a “ban on the free press.” The move is anathema to our First Amendment, but hey: A-plus for candor.

The president’s brazen viewpoint-based discrimination against CNN, MS NOW, and Politico is precisely why he will lose in court. (Disclosure: I work as CNN’s senior legal analyst and have friends and colleagues at MS NOW and Politico.) The First Amendment does........

© Daily Intelligencer