Mamdani confronts Trump with ‘all the members of the press’, hours after CNN, MS NOW and Politico sue over White House ban

President Donald Trump has long had an antagonistic relationship with the press.

He famously popularized the phrase “fake news” and has called reporters “the enemy of the people.” Yet the president is also more accessible to reporters than his recent predecessors, making media appearances on roughly 80% of his days in office during stretches of his second term and taking far more shouted questions and interviews than Obama or Biden ever took.

It’s a contradiction that defined Monday: a president who grants extraordinary access on his own terms, and revokes it entirely when the coverage displeases him.

And at New York’s Gracie Mansion on Monday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made sure to portray a different scene to the press.

“I told the president that we’re going to have all of the members of the press here on the lawn, and that is something that I believe in,” Mamdani said.

Standing next to him on the lawn of the famed city house was Trump, who on Friday announced he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from White House grounds over the “constant ‘reporting’ [of] FAKE NEWS.” By Monday morning, the three banned outlets had filed a joint First Amendment lawsuit in federal court in Washington D.C. , arguing the ban amounted to viewpoint discrimination and violated their due-process rights.

Other networks refused to provide White House pool coverage that day in solidarity, since CNN normally handles that rotation.

Friday’s action isn’t Trump’s first attempt to ban the press.

In 2018, the White House revoked the press pass of then-CNN reporter Jim Acosta, until a federal judge ordered it be restored.

More recently, in February 2025, he barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office and other small-pool events over the news agency’s refusal to adopt “Gulf of America,” instead of the widely-accepted “Gulf of Mexico.” (A judge initially ordered the access restored, only to be overruled by the the D.C.

Circuit in June 2025.) Asked by reporters about his closed-door conversation with Trump, Mamdani said he made sure the president knew the press would be present at Gracie Mansion.

Trump, in response, joked that the press would never boycott him, and again called the three outlets fake news.

“If you look at CNN, it’s fake news.

If you look at MS NOW, I don’t even know what MS NOW is,” he went on.