‘Fake news’ v faker-in-chief: Why Trump’s media war is backfiring

September 23, 2026 — 3:30pm

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President Donald J. Trump booted CNN, MSNOW and Politico out of the White House because he is furious with how he is covered. Trump’s attacks against the Constitution are unprecedented. The media companies have taken him to court, arguing: “Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.“

The four major television networks – including Fox News – have withdrawn their cameras from the White House. The president who loves to be on the air for hours a day now sits in the Oval Office with no big media cameras on him.

How did we get to this crisis over freedom of the press? Trump wields with abandon an idiom that is centuries old – all to flaunt his massive executive power as president. When asked about limits to his power, he said: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

To speak with a forked tongue is “to tell lies or say one thing and mean something else” and to “make empty or false promises”. It conjures up serpents, with their forked tongues.

Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, was characterised as a serpent. The stunning new biography, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird and Susan Goldberg, shows Cohn’s immense sculpting and shaping of Trump as he built his real estate empire in New York. As Carlos Lozada of The New........

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