White House Power Play over Press Pool Was Years in the Making

A s both a political philosophy and a matter of character, conservatism has many advantages over competing ideologies. Foremost among them is its comfort with contradictions and trade-offs. There is a cost to all that we do and don’t do. This fact of life discomforts those who refuse to accept the existence of consequences and the politicians whose careers thrive on the delusion that compromise is for the weak.

With that outlook in mind, it’s hard not to sympathize with Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich and what may prove to be her prescient warning. On Tuesday, the Trump White House announced that it would strip the White House Correspondents’ Association of its traditional prerogative to select “pool reporters” — a rotating cast of journalists who monitor and report on the president’s movements. That selection process will henceforth be the exclusive province of the president’s staff. The president’s supporters were jubilant over the maneuver, but Heinrich was having none of it.

“If you think MAGA benefits from this in the long term, you’re dead wrong,” she warned. “You would not have trusted any Democratic admin to pick its own pool — but now that door is open. WHCA has never opposed the WH adding to the pool — but picking it is another story. Just wait til a Dem admin plays that same game. You’ll hate it.”

She’s probably right. As a political rule of thumb, those in power should be reluctant to forge and deploy new weapons in the fight against their opponents, because those tools will invariably be wielded against their makers. Heinrich’s admonition is buttressed by her admirable prudence and her understanding of the WHCA as an institution, which her critics clearly lacked. She deserves credit for her candor at a time when what her audience wanted to see were enthusiastic nods of agreement with the president.

And yet, the same wisdom she displayed in these remarks has not been in evidence at the WHCA. In the absence of conservatism’s prudential tendency, the institution has indulged the notion that it could retain the Fourth Estate’s vestigial claims on objectivity while serving as a vehicle for left-leaning partisanship — and without any apparent regard for the consequences.

For example, on the same day that the White House announced the policy shift, the WHCA’s elected president, Eugene Daniels, revealed his intention to depart from his job at Politico, where he co-authors its widely read Playbook newsletter. Daniels is set to take on a larger role at MSNBC, where he has served as a contributor since 2021. (Full disclosure: I served as an MSNBC contributor from 2018 to 2020.) There, Daniels will assume new duties as a co-host of an opinion-heavy panel program.

I would not gainsay from my limited perspective Daniels’s career choices, and his reporting as a Politico correspondent has been valuable. But his abdication of even his pro forma role as an objective reporter undermines the WHCA’s protests against the White House’s maneuver — protests Daniels himself spearheaded — and its claim that its mission is to “ensure consistent professional standards and fairness in access on behalf of all readers, viewers and listeners.”

Americans do not think they’re getting that from the establishment press. To read encomia to “fairness” from a chat show host on one of America’s most left-wing networks renders the assertion a laugh line. A steward of the WHCA who had considered the trade-offs involved in his assumption of a platform that is antithetical to reporting “without fear of favor” might have abjured one of the two conflicting roles he presently occupies. But that’s not the culture at the WHCA. It hasn’t been for some time.

One of the most commendable things the president did during his first term in office was to boycott the annual WHCA-sponsored dinner — a hedonic spectacle in which Washington’s elite and the people tasked with holding them to account rub elbows. There, reporters savor the taste of celebrity alongside actual celebrities — a form of deferred compensation to make up for the psychological torment reporters experience on a daily basis by being surrounded with the wealthier and better connected. It is a testament to the WHCA’s belief that it is immune from politics that the soirée, nauseatingly referred to as “nerd prom,” is often headlined by acts that make a sport of antagonizing the American Right.

At the 2023 dinner, Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. “mainly focused his jokes on Republicans and Fox News,” as Mediaite described it. He laid into Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Dick Cheney, Clarence Thomas, and Ron DeSantis — throwing one pointed barb directed at Don Lemon in there for balance. The previous year, former Daily Show host Trevor Noah had pilloried DeSantis for doing things the Florida governor had not done but which Democrats had accused him of doing — surely a messaging convergence attributable entirely to coincidence. The tone of the event shifted slightly to the center in 2024 but not in response to what we could describe as a sense of civic responsibility.

Last year, Saturday Night Live cast member Colin Jost made a valiant effort to offend equally across the political spectrum — a task made easier by Joe Biden’s willingness to poke fun at his own age with some self-effacing humor. And we can attribute this glasnost-style disgorgement of long-suppressed truths to the onset, only two months earlier, of a cultural moment inside the press. That was when journalists began “second-guessing some of their reporting decisions” around Biden’s decrepitude, as Puck’s Dylan Byers put it. Only at that late date — well into the fourth year of Biden’s only term in office — did “the White House press corps” not only acknowledge but emphasize “that the symptoms of Biden’s age had become more noticeable in recent months and a frequent discussion topic at the desks behind the Brady briefing room.”

What prompted the change of heart? A power play by the Biden White House. In February of last year, the WHCA published a public missive protesting the White House’s written request that reporters soft-pedal special counsel Robert Hur’s damning report outlining Biden’s doddering demeanor. The letter, then-WHCA president Kelly O’Donnell wrote, was “misdirected” and “inappropriate,” a somnolent response compared with the paint-peeling missive Daniels directed at the Trump White House yesterday — and to what was, by any objective metric, a worse impingement on media’s freedoms than is the Trump administration’s recent action. Say what you will about its attack on WHCA’s pool privileges, the Trump White House is not threatening reporters with limited access to the president if it doesn’t like their reporting.

Did the WHCA think the rest of us wouldn’t notice these double standards? Did they assume they could flout professional propriety in perpetuity without encountering any trade-offs? It seems that way.

I would be surprised if the White House communications staff can cosset Trump in a cocoon of flatterers with press badges. Trump likes to talk, and he’ll talk to anyone. Nor is he as allergic to mainstream journalists as his rhetoric suggests. But Heinrich is right: A future president may be less inclined toward transparency, and he or she will inherit a tool that could limit the chief executive’s exposure to critics or merely inconvenient information. That’s nothing to celebrate, but whose fault is it? When the WHCA goes casting about for blame, its members should look at how the organization has been led.