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      Trump’s ‘Gulf of America’ debacle is no joke – this is how authoritarians get started

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      Last week, the Associated Press sued White House officials for violating its free press rights by punishing the organization for defying Donald Trump’s executive order to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”. Unfortunately, on Monday, a federal judge refused to immediately strike down the White House’s retaliatory treatment of the AP. But the case is far from over.Granting access to the White House on the suppressive conditions set by the Trump administration is a blow to the first amendment and the free press. If the retaliation against the AP is allowed to stand, more restrictions on the press are certain to follow, creating Kremlin-like conditions that will affect all Americans who might question, or be suspected of questioning, the Trump party line.This is why a seemingly trivial issue – what to call the Gulf – is freighted with importance. Trump’s renaming of the Gulf unmistakably delivers his “America first” message. He has every right to his message. But he doesn’t have the right to turn the press into his messenger.The controversy began on Trump’s first day back in office, when he issued a unilateral order that an international sea, known for centuries as the Gulf of Mexico, henceforth be named the Gulf of America. Certain organizations, such as Google, immediately complied by changing the Gulf’s name on Google Maps and redirecting searches for “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America”.However, the AP, along with several other news organizations, resisted. Noting that the Trump order had no effect outside the US, the AP made an editorial judgment that its status as an international reporting agency was best served by continuing to refer to the Gulf by the name known to global readers.The Trump administration retaliated by barring AP reporters from the press pool that covers media events at the White House or on Air Force One, and on Tuesday it went further, announcing it would determine which organizations had access to the pool – traditionally the job of the White House Correspondents’ Association. While limited seating capacity may give the White House some discretion about who gets to be in the press pool, the first amendment does not permit that discretion to be used to punish the press or to limit access to outlets favorable to Trump. As the AP stated in its complaint: “The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government. The Constitution does not allow the government to control speech” by controlling access.As tempting as it is to follow Shakespeare in shrugging the shoulders at “what’s in a name,” we should turn to history to learn what follows when authoritarian leaders start out with seemingly harmless verbal imperialisms. One of the first actions Hitler took after seizing power in 1933 was to scrub streets and public spaces of names that reflected Jewish influence or Weimar republicanism in favor of tributes to National Socialism. Stalin celebrated his own greatness by changing Tsaritsyn, now Volgograd, to “Stalingrad”. Before Stalingrad, there was the switch from Petrograd to Leningrad. In today’s China, the name “Tibet” has disappeared from Chinese maps in favor of the Mandarin name, “Xizang”.It is hard to know how seriously to take Trump’s flagging of territorial, as well as verbal, imperialism. He has suggested the US reclaim the Panama Canal Zone, buy Greenland from Denmark, incorporate Canada as a 51st state, and take over the Gaza Strip for resort real estate development. Even if these are mere paper ambitions, the disdain Trump shows for international law is already doing irreparable harm.Appealing to his Maga base with the “America first” rhetoric in the Gulf, he is selling out Ukraine to Putin’s Russia in ways reminiscent of the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler in 1938 by ceding parts of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. Ignoring this lesson of history – in Munich of all places – this month, JD Vance stopped short of endorsing the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party by name, but made clear that the Trump administration would be happy if Europe adopted the same anti-immigrant policies that Trump’s renaming of the Gulf signaled.The ripple effect of Trump commandeering global waters reaches beyond the sea to all Americans. His actions must be considered alongside his other executive orders on his first day back in office, declaring the arrival of immigrants at the southern border an “invasion” and suspending grants of asylum, no matter how dire the situation of refugees. When we let Trump scapegoat vulnerable immigrants for this country’s – and the world’s – problems, we are in fascist territory. That is why Trump’s renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America is no laughing matter. It expresses a level of disrespect for Mexico that could well be a precursor for how strongmen treat peoples whom they first strip of dignity. Substitute Jew, Catholic, Turk, Armenian, Arab, gay or transgender for Trump’s talk of an invasion of aliens across the Gulf, and you get the point.What the Gulf needs is not more nationalistic power grabs but international cooperation to tackle its most pressing problems – worsening pollution, rising sea levels from the climate crisis, intensifying hurricanes, crumbling infrastructure, and loss of shoreline and habitat. Far from squabbling over what to call the Gulf, the US and Mexico should recognize that no one owns the Gulf; it belongs to nature.In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet made her “what’s in a name” speech to declare love for Romeo even though he bore the family name of her family’s blood enemy. It didn’t turn out well for Juliet, and it won’t turn out well for us if we let Trump intimidate the AP because its editors had the courage to stand up to his bullying.

      Jeffrey Abramson is author of Minerva’s Owl: The Tradition of Western Political Thought. Jack E Davis is the author of The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2018. More

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      White House says it will decide which news outlets cover Trump

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      The White House said it will take control over which news organizations and reporters are allowed into the presidential press pool covering Donald Trump.“The White House press team in this administration will determine who gets to enjoy the very privileged and limited access in spaces such as Air Force One and the Oval Office,” the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a briefing on Tuesday.The announcement came a day after the Trump administration won a temporary ruling allowing it to bar the Associated Press (AP) in retaliation for the outlet’s decision to resist Trump’s demand to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), an independent association made up of members of the media, traditionally coordinates rotating pool coverage of more than a dozen journalists allowed access to the president in smaller settings.Leavitt asserted that the WHCA “should no longer have a monopoly” of press access at the White House and that “legacy media outlets who have been here for years will still participate in the pool, but new voices are going to be welcomed in as well”.After Trump signed an executive order last month directing the US interior department to change the Gulf of Mexico’s name, the AP said it would continue to use the gulf’s long-established name in stories while also acknowledging Trump’s efforts to change it.In response, the White House banned AP journalists from accessing the Oval Office and Air Force One, accusing the news agency of “irresponsible and dishonest reporting”.The US district judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, denied a request by the AP on Monday to restore its access to the Oval Office, Air Force One and events held at the White House.The news agency had argued that the decision to block its reporters violates the US constitution’s first amendment protections against government abridgment of speech by trying to dictate the language they use in reporting the news.Leavitt celebrated the judge’s ruling and said the White House wants “more outlets and new outlets to cover the press pool”. “It’s beyond time the White House press pool reflects the media habits of the American people in 2025,” she added.In a statement, the WHCA said the decision “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps,” the organization’s president, Eugene Daniels, said.“For generations, the working journalists elected to lead the White House Correspondents’ Association board have consistently expanded the WHCA’s membership and its pool rotations to facilitate the inclusion of new and emerging outlets.”The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called it “a drastic change in how the public obtains information about its government.“The White House press pool exists to serve the public, not the presidency,” the group’s president, Bruce Brown, said in a statement. More

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      White House Moves to Pick the Pool Reporters Who Cover Trump

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      The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Tuesday that the Trump administration would start handpicking which media outlets were allowed to participate in the presidential pool, the small, rotating group of journalists who relay the president’s day-to-day activities to the public.The change announced by Ms. Leavitt breaks decades of precedent. The White House Correspondents’ Association, a group representing journalists who cover the administration, has long determined on its own which reporters would participate in the daily pool.Because presidents often hold events in smaller settings like the Oval Office, where not every reporter who covers the president can fit, the pool format has long been used to ensure that journalists accurately record a president’s comments. The reporters who witness the events distribute a series of “pool reports” to a wider group of journalists, including hundreds of news outlets that cover his daily activities and remarks.The pool is most often made up of journalists from organizations like CNN, Reuters, The Associated Press, ABC News, Fox News and The New York Times.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, speaking to reporters in the briefing room this month.Eric Lee/The New York TimesMs. Leavitt said that the new policy was intended to allow “new media” outlets — such as digital sites, streaming services and podcasts — “to share in this awesome responsibility.”The White House Correspondents’ Association rebuked the move in a blistering statement.“This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” Eugene Daniels, the president of the association, wrote. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”The association said that it had been given no warning of Ms. Leavitt’s announcement and that there had been no prior discussions about it with the White House. “The W.H.C.A. will never stop advocating for comprehensive access, full transparency and the right of the American public to read, listen to and watch reports from the White House, delivered without fear or favor,” Mr. Daniels wrote.The Trump administration recently added a “new media” seat in the White House briefing room. The seat has been occupied by some journalists who strive for accuracy and fairness, such as reporters at Axios and Semafor, and by partisan figures who are sympathetic to the Trump administration, such as the podcast host Sage Steele.“Legacy media outlets who been here for years will still participate in the pool, but new voices are going to be welcomed in as well,” Ms. Leavitt said at Tuesday’s press briefing.Ms. Leavitt did not provide specific details of how the plan might work, but it would allow President Trump and his aides to handpick which reporters and media personalities were granted the ability to ask him questions and observe his behavior at specific events.Ms. Leavitt put a different spin on it. “By deciding which outlets make up the limited press pool on a day-to-day basis, the White House will be restoring power back to the American people,” she said. More

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      in Elections

      Trump and Paramount Seek Mediator for CBS News Lawsuit

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      The move is another indicator that the two sides are exploring ways to resolve the case, over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview, out of court.Lawyers for Paramount and President Trump have agreed to appoint a mediator in his $20 billion lawsuit against CBS, according to two people with knowledge of the decision.The move to bring in a mediator is another indicator that the two sides are trying to resolve the case, over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, out of court. A mediator could help them reach a settlement, but whether they will do so remains far from certain.Paramount declined to comment. Ed Paltzik, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, said in a statement: “President Trump will pursue this vital matter to its just and rightful conclusion.”Mr. Trump sued CBS days before the 2024 election, accusing the company of deceptively editing the interview with his Democratic opponent. He later amended the suit to include Paramount as a separate defendant.Paramount, CBS’s parent company, began settlement talks with Mr. Trump this year. Those talks have created discord at Paramount, with employees at CBS News strongly opposed to any settlement. Bill Owens, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” told the show’s staff this month that he would not apologize as part of any prospective settlement after The New York Times reported that the settlement talks with Mr. Trump were underway.The lawsuit has complicated Paramount’s merger with Skydance, a deal that would unite an up-and-coming media start-up backed by the tech mogul Larry Ellison with the gilded Hollywood studio behind “The Godfather” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” The multibillion-dollar deal, struck last year, would end the Redstone family’s decades-long run atop Paramount and anoint Mr. Ellison and his son, David, in their stead.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      US judge allows Trump’s AP Oval Office ban to stand over Gulf of Mexico name

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      A federal judge on Monday denied a request by the Associated Press to immediately restore full access to presidential events for the news agency’s journalists.The US district judge Trevor McFadden declined to grant the AP’s request for a temporary injunction restoring its access to the Oval Office, Air Force One and events held at the White House. The Trump administration barred the outlet earlier this month for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico in its coverage after the president renamed it the “Gulf of America”.McFadden, a Trump appointee, said the restriction on “more private areas” used by Trump was different from prior instances in which courts have blocked government officials from revoking access to journalists.“I can’t say the AP has shown a likelihood of success here,” McFadden said.But he also described the ban as “problematic” and advised the government that “case law in this circuit is uniformly unhelpful to the White House”. McFadden said the issue required more exploration before ruling. Another hearing in the case has been set for next month.The AP filed a lawsuit over the ban last week, in which it named three senior Trump aides and argued that the decision to block its reporters from certain locations violates the US constitution’s first amendment protections against government abridgment of speech by trying to dictate the language they use in reporting the news.“The constitution prevents the president of the United States or any other government official from coercing journalists or anyone else into using official government vocabulary to report the news,” Charles Tobin, a lawyer for the AP, said during a court hearing.The outlet’s attorneys argued the AP would face “irreparable harm” if the ban was not immediately lifted.Trump administration lawyers argued in a court filing before the hearing that the AP does not have a constitutional right to what they called “special media access to the president”.Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, had called the AP lawsuit a “blatant PR stunt” while Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has said: “We feel we are in the right in this position.”Leavitt is one of the three White House officials named as defendants in the lawsuit. The other two, Susan Wiles, the chief of staff, and Taylor Budowich, the deputy chief of staff, have not responded to requests for comment.Trump signed an executive order last month directing the US interior department to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.The AP said in January it would continue to use the gulf’s long-established name in stories while also acknowledging Trump’s efforts to change it.The White House banned AP reporters in response, preventing the AP’s journalists from seeing and hearing Trump and other top White House officials as they take newsworthy actions or respond in real time to news events.“We’re going to keep them out until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America,” Trump said last week.The White House Correspondents’ Association said in a legal brief backing the AP in the case that the ban “will chill and distort news coverage of the president to the public’s detriment”.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Lester Holt to exit NBC Nightly News as MSNBC cuts Ayman Mohyeldin’s show

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      NBC’s Lester Holt is stepping down as anchor of its Nightly News show, and MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin is stepping down from a similar role at his namesake weekend evening show as the liberal networks’ owners continue a major programming shake-up on Monday.Others at MSNBC affected by changes revealed on Monday include Katie Phang and Jonathan Capehart, the New York Post reported.Holt, who has served as the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News for a decade, is leaving the broadcast early this summer, the network reported.A successor for Holt on the program is yet to be named. He will reportedly continue to work with NBC, which shares an owner with MSNBC, as the principal anchor at Dateline, a role he has held for nearly 15 years.At the same time, staff of Mohyeldin’s show, named Ayman, learned on Monday that the last episode of Ayman is likely to air on 20 April. Another source at the network said Mohyeldin would anchor a new program yet to be announced.The New York Post reported learning that Phang and Capehart’s shows were also being canceled but would remain at the network. The plan is for Capehart, like Mohyeldin, to host a new show, and Phang would continue as a legal correspondent.In a recording of a meeting about the cancellation of Mohyeldin’s show, an MSNBC official said the network was “making several changes to our programming lineup”.The official subsequently said that the network had “hit success” with ensemble shows and was looking to invest in shows with the ensemble format in order to meet “audience needs”.Those remarks came a day after news broke that MSNBC had canceled the longstanding anchor Joy Reid’s show, The ReidOut. The network plans to replace Reid’s show with a new one led by three co-anchors: Symone Sanders-Townsend, Alicia Menendez and Michael Steele, who have been co-hosting MSNBC’s The Weekend Show.Mohyeldin has hosted several shows at MSNBC, including Morning Joe First Look, an early morning pre-show for one of the network’s flagship shows. In 2021, his namesake show was given a prime-time weekend evening slot.The anchor also served as a correspondent for NBC in Gaza during a monthlong conflict in 2014, receiving praise from media critics for reporting that departed from “the standard pro-Israel coverage that dominates establishment American press coverage”.The changes affecting Reid and Mohyeldin result from a reshuffling by the network’s new president, Rebecca Kutler, who took over the role in February.Kutler, who was previously MSNBC’s senior vice-president for content strategy, succeeds the former MSNBC president Rashida Jones.According to a statement given to the Guardian by MSNBC, the network will also introduce a new trio of co-hosts to anchor a morning and evening edition of The Weekend on Saturdays and Sundays at 7am and 6pm ET.Jonathan Capehart, an MSNBC host and Washington Post associate editor, will serve as one co-anchor of the morning edition.Mohyeldin will serve as anchor of a different group on the evening addition. Ali Velshi will also expand his namesake program, Velshi, to three hours on the weekends.MSNBC confirmed that Joy Reid will be leaving the network. Rotating anchors will host the hour in the coming weeks.The network also confirms that it will sunset its broadcasting operation in Miami. This affects the Miami-based shows José Díaz-Balart Reports and The Katie Phang Show.According to a source, the entire staff of The ReidOut, José Díaz-Balart Reports and The Katie Phang Show are being let go. Staff will be given the option to reapply for a job on one of the shows or take severance and quit. They have six weeks to decide which option to take, the source said.That source added that the changes are due in part to MSNBC no longer wanting to use Telemundo, the Spanish-language network that is headquartered in Miami.In November last year, the Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski faced backlash after meeting with Trump to discuss “a new approach” after his election in November to a second presidency.Also in November, Comcast announced plans to spin off several cable networks, including MSNBC, as the TV networks faced declining ratings, which only further declined following election fatigue.Chuck Todd, a prominent anchor and former host of Meet The Press, announced in January that he was leaving NBC, another Comcast company, after 18 years. The announcement followed Todd’s pushback against NBC’s decision to hire Ronna McDaniel, the former Republican National Committee chairperson during Donald Trump’s first presidency, in March 2024. McDaniel was eventually removed from her position.Trump, who has previously described news media as “the enemy of the people”. celebrated the cancelation of Reid’s show on his platform Truth Social, saying she should have been “canned long ago”. More

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      The ‘Gulf of America’ feud is about something bigger: Trump wants to control the media | Margaret Sullivan

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      It might seem like a small matter, just a disagreement over whether a body of water should be called one name or another.But it’s really about much bigger things: Trump-style intimidation, a clear violation of the first amendment – and the extent to which news organizations will stick together in each other’s defense, or will comply with the powerful for the sake of their own access.Even more broadly, it is about Donald Trump’s wide-ranging effort to control the media and be able to spread propaganda and interfere with the flow of accurate information.The disagreement started soon after the president decided unilaterally that the Gulf of Mexico was to be called the Gulf of America. The executive order was one more display of Trump’s capricious and imperious way of doing things; his first month has been a relentless exercise in chaos and norm-destruction.After the Associated Press, the global news organization, decided to stick with using the long-established name which makes sense to its international readership, the Trump White House determined that punishment was in order.An AP reporter was barred from a White House press event, and since then, things have only escalated. More AP reporters barred from briefings and from the president’s plane. Access denied.What’s happening is ugly. In the US, the government doesn’t get to dictate the language journalists use in their stories. There’s a little thing called the first amendment to the US constitution that prohibits this. But the Trump administration, as usual, has its own – often unconstitutional and sometimes illegal – ideas.The actions against the AP are “retribution, plain and simple, and a shameful attempt to bully the press into ideological compliance”, said Tim Richardson of PEN America.On Thursday, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press sent a letter to the White House signed by 30 news organizations, and the White House Correspondents Association is similarly registering its displeasure.But letters – even signed by many and ever so strongly worded – are easy to ignore. The solution, if there is one, will require more forceful measures: lawsuits and journalistic solidarity that might include a widespread boycotting of White House press briefings.After all, compliance is a slippery slope. What happens, for example, when Trump proclaims that Ukraine is no longer Ukraine, but to be simply called Russia? Do news organizations politely accept the rewriting of history?“What do the media do then,” queried the longtime environmental journalist Andrew Revkin, “agree to those terms so they can stay in the briefing room?”Why stop there? How about declaring by fiat that the Washington monument is now to be called the Trump monument? Why not chisel another presidential face onto Mount Rushmore and call it Mount Donald?The great renaming has begun, and George Orwell would understand exactly what’s going on.A few days ago, a media leader I admire – Jim Friedlich, the CEO of the Lenfest Institute, a non-profit organization that owns the Philadelphia Inquirer – proposed a notion that deserves serious consideration. There should be, he wrote, a “NATO for News,” in which every legitimate news organization formally pledges to defend the others. This happens now, from time to time, but Friedlich has something more deliberate in mind, he wrote in the Inquirer.All of this is happening within a larger and quite alarming anti-press context.Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk recently fantasized about a “long prison sentence” for journalists on CBS’s 60 Minutes, which has been under fire for its (normal and conventional) editing of a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris.Trump has sued the Pulitzer prize board for statements in defense of its awards to the Washington Post and the New York Times for their coverage of Trump’s relationship with Russia; he’s sued the Des Moines Register over a pre-election public opinion poll. And the Pentagon recently tossed eight traditional news organizations from office spaces to make room for pro-Maga outlets.“The Trump administration has decided that it will actively wield access as a tool to reshape the media landscape in its favor,” Oliver Darcy wrote in his media newsletter, Status. It surely will also use more legal threats and actions.Given that we’re only a month into this brave new world, some unity and stiff-spined resolve are very much in order.That won’t be easy. Getting journalists together is like herding pigeons. And no journalist wants to lose access to sources and to being where news is made. But in this era, it couldn’t be more important to push back hard.The free press may be going down, but if so, we should go down swinging.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      ‘The greatest propaganda op in history’: Trump’s reshaping of US culture evokes past antidemocratic regimes

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      Bigger than the Super Bowl, claimed Donald Trump, sitting in a big leather chair beside a big map. Then came an announcement over the public address system. “Air Force One is currently in international waters,” declared the flight crew of the US presidential jet, “for the first time in history flying over the recently renamed Gulf of America.”As his aides clapped and whooped, Trump gloated: “Isn’t that nice? We’re about ‘Make America Great Again’, right? That’s what we care about.” He proceeded to sign a proclamation declaring 9 February “Gulf of America Day” as Air Force One flew over the body of water previously known as the Gulf of Mexico.It was classic Trumpian showmanship from the highest perch in the world. It was also the latest salvo by the 47th president and his allies to control language, influence media narratives and reshape cultural institutions in ways that some compare with the Soviet Union or other authoritarian regimes from history.Long a master of branding, Trump is making propaganda a core element of his strongman presidency. This comes as little surprise to critics who regard it as an extension of last year’s election campaign in which he sold himself as a champion of the forgotten people and victim of a weaponised justice department.Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “Donald Trump’s re-election is the greatest, most successful propaganda op in history. Propaganda is why Donald Trump is president again and they know this, which is why they undermined the press, expertise and science.”Since taking office, Trump has outpaced his predecessors by signing 64 executive orders and 27 memos and proclamations in less than a month. His blitz on immigration, trade and the federal bureaucracy was expected. But the president’s aggressive approach to reshaping national identity through symbolism and language has taken opponents by surprise.When Trump used his inaugural address to assert his vision of US dominance by promising to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton burst out laughing. But the switch came with a sinister edge.This week, the White House banned the Associated Press, one of the world’s biggest news outlets, because it has not changed its stylebook entry for Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America (the AP serves numerous countries that do not recognise the new name). The punitive measure prompted CNN to invoke “newspeak” from George Orwell’s novel 1984, in which language is a tool of control and can be narrowed to limit thought.In a similar vein, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, signed an order restoring the name of a special operations forces base in North Carolina back to Fort Bragg, reversing a Joe Biden effort in 2023 to remove names that honored Confederate leaders (Hegseth swerved past that association by this time recognising Roland Bragg, an obscure veteran of the second world war).The White House is also redefining terms to cast opponents in a negative light – for example, by referring to fired federal employees as “deep-state activists”. The National Park Service erased references to transgender people on its webpage for the Stonewall national monument.As the AP discovered, the media – long derided by Trump as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” – is now subject to a system of rewards and punishments. The owners of the Washington Post and major social media platforms such as Facebook and X had the best seats in the house at his inauguration.At least 10 of the 18 reporters that the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called on during her briefing this week work for partisan rightwing outlets. Officials at the Pentagon decided to “rotate” eight major news outlets from their workspaces, replacing them with more Trump-friendly media, and invited a far-right activist, Jack Posobiec, to take part in Hegseth’s first trip overseas.In addition, Trump is pursuing lawsuits against media outlets by using novel legal theories to circumvent established first amendment protections, while his allies are using the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to target broadcast news networks whose content they deem unfavorable.View image in fullscreenThere are concerns that the intimidatory tactics are working. Setmayer, who now leads the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee, said: “The mainstream American media has failed. What is happening is not a normal transition; it’s a constitutional crisis. That’s the way the American media should be covering this and they’re not.“They’re parsing their words. They’re whitewashing and sanewashing what Elon Musk has been allowed to do and what Donald Trump is telegraphing he plans to do more of. They’ve made a business decision to obey in advance. It’s not an accident that Trump went after the FCC licenses and sued these media conglomerates for them to bend their knees to him, so they won’t cover him honestly.”Trump is also making a surprise foray into arts and culture with a hostile takeover of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, a living memorial for the 35th president that, with a $268m budget last year, hosts classical music, dance, hip-hop, opera, theatre, touring productions and educational arts programming.Trump has installed himself as chair, stacked the board of trustees with his loyalists and replaced president Deborah Rutter with his former acting director of national intelligence, Ric Grenell, a disrupter who has no prior experience in arts administration.“We know the importance of the arts in telling stories and keeping the truth out there and in being part of the resistance, so it is no accident that Trump is coming for the arts, similar to other fascists in history,” Setmayer said.The president admitted he has not been to the Kennedy Center but felt the overhaul was necessary because of drag shows that are “specifically targeting our youth” as well as other “anti-American propaganda”. He told reporters: “We’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country.” In response, several stars have dissociated themselves from the centre.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt the same time, the National Endowment for the Arts, the biggest national funder of the arts and arts education with a budget of $207m in 2024, has cancelled grants aimed at marginalised groups and posted updated guidelines stating that grant recipients should “not operate any programs promoting ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)’” or “use federal funds to promote gender ideology”.The changes fueled concerns about the politicisation of the arts, with critics pointing to examples of dictators in history who suppressed and censored artists.Olivia Troye, a former adviser to then vice-president Mike Pence, said: “There’s a lot of things I expected from Trump, having worked with his circle of people, but I have to say that it was striking to me when he decided to insert himself and take over the Kennedy Center because that to me was a sign that it is him wanting to fully control all narratives.”Trump is exhibiting an authoritarian streak and seeking to curb dissent, Troye added: “The arts is a significant pillar of watching what happens in nations that are facing the potential failing of their democracy and that’s concerning. People need to be paying attention to these types of thing.”“They may seem frivolous: why do I care what he did to the Kennedy Center? Well, let’s look at the history. Who has ever done that as president? Why is he doing that? It’s all part of the overarching effort by this individual who wants to control every narrative there is.”Like past authoritarians, Trump understands the power of symbols such as Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, which is carved with the faces of former presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna of Florida proposed legislation adding Trump to the monument, explaining: “President Trump’s bold leadership and steadfast dedication to America’s greatness have cemented his place in history.”Trump has issued an order to revive a “National Garden of American Heroes”, an attempt to curate a version of history that reinforces ideas of national exceptionalism. The representative Buddy Carter of Georgia has introduced a bill to rename Greenland as “Red, White, and Blueland”, as Trumpseeks to acquire the island territory.Trump has also called for “patriotic education”, attempting to control what is taught in schools and instil a conservative vision. The administration is pushing to restrict what teachers can teach about gender and race and has threatened to withhold funds from schools that fail to comply.Above all, the 47th president is dominating the nation’s attention, filling news cycles and social media 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Last Sunday, he became the first sitting US president to attend the Super Bowl, the crown jewel of US sport, which drew a record 127 million viewers and “a Caesar-at-the-Colosseum air,” according to New York Times critic James Poniewozik.Then, when Trump hosted ally Elon Musk and his son X in the Oval Office, there was saturation coverage. White House communications director Steven Cheung tweeted an image of eight news networks simultaneously broadcasting the meeting and boasted: “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”Reed Galen, president of the Union, a pro-democracy coalition, said: “With dictators throughout history, it’s all spectacle. The idea of propaganda is not necessarily to lie about things but to keep the attention focused where you want it, and he’s a master of that.”Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history and Italian studies professor at New York University and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, describes Trump as “one of the most successful propagandists in all of history”, as skilled as the former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in his use of images, symbols and repetition.She said: “The cult of personality is that you must be omnipotent but you’re also omnipresent, you’re everywhere. It’s not just old-school dictatorships like North Korea today or communist China where the face of the leader is everywhere.“Nowadays, for example, Modi in India is the most followed leader in the world. He’s a genius at Instagram. When he ran for office in 2014, he used holograms so he could be in a hundred places at the same time. Being everywhere and inescapable is part of making the population depend on you and on no one else.” More