Note on Trump and the First Amendment

A lot of people wrote in, both in comments and in my DMs, after yesterday’s article criticizing Donald Trump’s goofball policies with White House credentials. It’s true that no one has a right to a press pass. It’s also true that presidents deny passes all the time for political reasons. The issue is that a president can’t say, out loud, that he or she is denying a pass for speech reasons. From Perry v. Sindermann:

For at least a quarter-century, this Court has made clear that, even though a person has no “right” to a valuable governmental benefit, and even though the government may deny him the benefit for any number of reasons, there are some reasons upon which the government may not rely. It may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected interest, especially his interest in freedom of speech.

This doesn’t rate high on my personal list of First Amendment threats (I actually laughed the first time I heard about the “Gulf of America” story), but it’s clearly verboten and when Trump does things like this, it underscores that he doesn’t care about rules. If you want to show that you “cherish” the free press, do what every president does: mess with them legally.