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The legal rubber met the authoritarian road last week with a full-frontal assault on the fundamental freedom of the press. Donald Trump ordered White House press passes to be revoked from three major news organizations because of their critical coverage of his administration. A federal judge ordered the White House to reinstate the passes, and they were reinstated, but those press organizations were banned from a state dinner Thursday night and CNN was kept off Air Force One on the weekend. It’s Schrödinger’s judicial order, and on this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick welcomed Jameel Jaffer, the inaugural executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, to try to understand how we can live under a theoretical regime of press freedom that can be turned on and off by the president at will. Their conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, follows.

Dahlia Lithwick: So let’s start here. CNN, Politico, and MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), were denied access to the White House after the president decreed in a post on Truth Social that they would lose their ability to enter the building because of his feelings about their biased coverage. Last Wednesday, Judge Timothy Kelly of the D.C. Circuit held an emergency hearing in a lawsuit filed by the news outlets, and at around midnight, Judge Kelly issued a temporary restraining order to stop the White House ban for 14 days. The Knight Center, along with the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, filed a brief in the case that was signed on to by news organizations. Can you tell us what issues you centered in that brief, and just lay out what relief it was that the plaintiffs felt was so urgently needed?

Jameel Jaffer: This is a very unusual case in a number of ways. One of them is that there’s no dispute that the president has acted on the basis of viewpoint. You know, normally in First Amendment cases, there is a factual dispute about the motivations of government action. Often the disputes center on this........

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