Last week the presidential campaign of Donald Trump made a spectacle of its decision to cancel The Post’s credentials. “Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign, we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post,” Trump wrote in a Facebook posting. It’s a move that the campaign has taken against a number of publications including the Daily Beast, the Huffington Post and the Des Moines Register.
And now we know a bit more about the careful deliberations that go into such bans. Olivia Nuzzi, a politics reporter for the Daily Beast, has written a profile of 27-year-old Trump campaign press secretary Hope Hicks. It includes this passage:
As for what arrives in Hicks’s in-box, a typical day brings upwards of 250 media requests. Usually, she alone decides who gets in and who’s kept out. But sometimes it’s Trump who plays bouncer for his own private party. “She sees the tantrums, and there are tantrums,” a source who’s been with Trump and Hicks told me. “He reads something he doesn’t like by a reporter, and it’s like, ‘This m[—–]f[—-]! All right, fine. Hope?’ He circles it. ‘This guy’s banned! He’s banned for a while.’ That’s exactly how it works.” Hicks plays parole officer to an extensive and expanding blacklist of outlets and reporters (your correspondent once included) no longer welcome at his events.
As president, of course, Trump wouldn’t be doing these sorts of things, according to Donald Trump.