WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump showed off his new White House helicopter landing pad yesterday (Sept. 21), attempting to brush aside a First Amendment firestorm even as major television networks kept their cameras away in protest of CNN’s being banned from the grounds.
A light drizzle fell on the South Lawn as Trump used oversized gold scissors to cut a red, white and blue ribbon. He then exchanged handshakes with officials and some members of a construction crew wearing green smocks and hard hats, seeking to portray business as usual.
If he had words to mark the occasion, however, it was impossible to hear them over the noise of his waiting helicopter. Normally, TV network crews work to capture clearer audio.
Trump didn’t answer reporters’ shouted questions before climbing aboard Marine One on his way to New York. Instead, he wrote on his social media site, “We are just leaving the White House Lawn on the maiden voyage from the newly built, and very beautiful, Heliport!”
MS NOW, Politico and CNN have sued after Trump announced Friday that he was banning them from covering the White House in a clear escalation of his long-running efforts — in the courts and through administrative action — to restrict news coverage he finds objectionable.
CNN normally participates in a five-network rotation that provides pooled footage of daily events at the White House. When the network was barred from taking its assigned turn on Monday, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News agreed collectively to the extraordinary step of skipping Trump’s helipad ceremony.
Trump has long crowed about how the new helipad — featuring extensive granite that he boasts will have a “million-year life,” as well as a large insignia reading the “Seal of the President of the United States” — would impress Chinese President Xi Jinping, who arrives tomorrow for a state visit.
He’s been focused on wowing Xi even as he decried Democrats as communists in an attempt to help Republicans retain control of Congress in upcoming midterm elections. But Trump’s effort to curb access for news outlets to the White House has overshadowed his pet building projects and Xi’s visit.
Igniting constitutional questions over news-media access also eclipsed the reason Trump was lifting off from the helipad — the annual trip to attend the United Nations General Assembly beginning today.
Speaking later to reporters in New York after meeting with the city’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, Trump tried again to shrug off the lack of network TV coverage of his movements.
“It’s interesting because they said they were gonna boycott me. But they never boycott me,” the president said, before adding, “I think that these outlets have an obligation to be fair.”
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