Two things are true about President Donald Trump’s relationship with the press: He takes a lot of questions from reporters, and he’s directing a wide-ranging and unnervingly effective effort to chill critical coverage by punishing news outlets and threatening journalists. 

The Politico’s flagship Playbook newsletter opened on Wednesday with a beat-sweetening item lavishing Trump with praise for the former while soft-peddling the latter. 

Jack Blanchard’s piece plugs Trump’s “remarkable record of public availability” in office, “especially when compared to his famously sheltered predecessor,” adding that he is “on course to being just about the most-accessible president in modern history.” 

The president’s willingness to take “questions from all-comers” is “impressive stuff” that “matters,” Blanchard explains: “Trump’s answers may sometimes be rambling, erratic — or even downright unpleasant — but every American voter can see where he’s at.”’

Let’s bracket, for the sake of argument, the quality of the information reporters are able to extract given Trump's tendency to constantly lie to them. 

Even on those terms, Blanchard’s argument falters when he references, as a literal “aside,” the “lamentable attempt to ban AP.” 

Trump’s attempt to ban access for reporters from the wire service that provides national reporting to local newspapers across the country would indeed seem to undermine the claim that he is a uniquely accessible figure. And even then, Blanchard is offering a wildly understated version of what happened:

• Trump decided to rename the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America.”
• The AP continued referring to the body of water as the Gulf of Mexico.
• Trump explicitly punished the AP for this affront by barring its reporters from the White House press pool and other events.
• After the AP sued, a Trump-appointed judge ruled this an unconstitutional act of government viewpoint discrimination and ordered the AP’s access restored.
• The White House responded to the ruling by eliminating the press pool’s dedicated slot for wire service reporters, instead lumping them with print outlets.
• The judge declined a subsequent AP challenge to the move, saying he was “inclined to agree with the government” that the new policy was “facially neutral.”

In short, rather than the “lamentable” but unsuccessful “attempt” Blanchard describes, the reality is the White House is continuing to punish a news outlet for its content. Indeed, according to Oliver Darcy of Status News, the fracas has led other news outlets to avoid naming the body of water in question out of fear that they, too, will face federal retaliation. 

And, perhaps most notably, the AP ban is merely a single salvo in a multifront attack on the press that aims to quell critical coverage of Trump. 

Trump is leveraging the federal regulatory apparatus against the parent companies and corporate owners of media outlets in order to keep them in line. And that effort appears to be finding some success.

“Executives at major media outlets are reportedly instructing their newsrooms to temper their coverage of President Trump and his administration amid growing fears of political retribution,” Axios reported Tuesday. “President Trump may not have the political power to pass laws that hurt the press, but his threats of regulatory scrutiny and private lawsuits have proven just as damaging in silencing his critics.”

The Axios story provides a rundown of how the owners of outlets including CBS News, ABC News, The Washington Post (where my wife works), and the Los Angeles Times are crumbling under pressure from Trump. The president is very open about this strategy; indeed, he has gloated to reporters about how effective it has been.

The administration also poses a threat to individual journalists. 

Trump regularly accuses his media foes of breaking the law; last month, for example, he demanded criminal investigations into media pollsters for producing findings which displeased him.  

His attorney general, Pam Bondi, terminated rules which restricted prosecutors from seeking records and testimony from journalists as part of leak investigations. One potential target for those expanded powers could be Blanchard’s colleagues: FBI deputy director Dan Bongino announced on Sunday that the bureau is stepping up its investigation into the 2022 leak to Politico of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade’s abortion protections.

Foreign writers like Blanchard, a Brit who is in the United States on a visa, face particular vulnerabilities under the Trump regime. Federal immigration officials revoked the visa of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk and then arrested and detained her in March over an op-ed she co-authored for the Tufts student newspaper last year; she languished in ICE facilities for six weeks before a judge ordered her release.

But today at least, Blanchard has nothing to worry about — his work earned him a nice head pat from the White House and the GOP.