The President, the Press, and the Midterms

A Gate Shuts

On a Saturday morning in late September the White House North Gate became a small, public stage for a story about access. An MS NOW reporter and a photographer approached the checkpoint and found their badges would not scan. An officer asked for them and took them. The reporter, Akayla Gardner, said the officer told her the problem was above him. A producer with the same outlet was still able to get in, with no explanation offered for the difference.

CNN and Politico reported the same morning that their reporters were denied entry and had their passes seized. CNN said it had a right under the US Constitution to report without hindrance and called the ban an illegal assault on a fundamental right. Politico’s editor-in-chief said the company stood by its reporters and would vigorously defend First Amendment rights. MS NOW said the White House belongs to the American people and the decisions made inside are funded by tax dollars, and that it intends to take any and all steps necessary to defend its rights and the essential role of independent journalism.

The move followed a Truth Social post on Friday in which the president said he was barring the three outlets effective immediately for constant reporting of fake news and lies. He said the decision was cumulative stories over the last few years and suggested others could be added. Asked later what he meant by others to come, he named the New York Times and the Washington Post as fake news.

The White House Correspondents Association said the administration should immediately restore access and accused it of violating the First Amendment. Its president said the issue is about more than the rights of journalists but the right of the American people to receive a full and independent account of the activities, policies and decisions of whoever occupies the nation’s highest office. Courts have repeatedly held that once the White House provides access to journalists it cannot deny that access arbitrarily or based on the content of their reporting.

Some Democrats described the ban as an attempt to control the press and distract voters as Republicans face deep challenges in the midterm elections. A New York Times analysis framed the ban as part of a pattern of using the apparatus of government to crack down on perceived enemies after a string of losses.

Two Nights in Dallas

The convention that preceded the ban was held Sept. 9 and 10 in Dallas, the first Republican Party convention during the midterms. On the first night President Donald Trump spoke for nearly two hours. He promised every adult citizen a $5,000 dividend if Republicans won the House and Senate, suggesting tariff policies would pay for it. The price tag for 245 million adults would be around $1.2 trillion. Revenue from tariffs had increased under Trump but the levies were not bringing in trillions of dollars, and analysts noted it would take more than six years for tariffs to cover the cost.

He repeatedly warned that communists could take over Congress if they didn’t, conflating Democratic socialists with communists despite a small minority of candidates identifying as socialists. He repeated an unsupported claim that an unprecedented $20 trillion has been invested in the US from outside countries and companies, a figure nearly double the White House’s own speculative number.

He made false and misleading claims about the One Big Beautiful Bill’s tax reduction, saying it wasn’t the largest tax cut in history. He said Democrats voted against no taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security, but their opposition stemmed from tax cuts for the wealthy and reductions in Medicaid spending to pay for the legislation. He twisted facts to indirectly blame North Carolina Senate candidate Roy Cooper for the murder of a woman on a train in 2025. He boasted that more people are working than ever before by a lot, while about 800,000 more people were working than in January 2025, largely because the population had also grown and the labor market was doing slightly worse when factoring that in.

He falsely claimed food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down, while prices had gone up, rising even faster than during the latter part of the Biden administration. He claimed Americans now pay the lowest prices in the entire world for prescription drugs thanks to his policies, with no evidence for that case. He made exaggerated immigration claims, wrongly saying zero illegal aliens had entered from the southern border in the last 15 months, claiming 25 million immigrants poured in illegally during the Biden administration, and wrongly claiming the Biden administration allowed in 11,888 murderers. He again falsely suggested the US became the world leader in oil and gas production during the current administration.

On the second night Vice President JD Vance gave the keynote, joined by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., House Speaker Mike Johnson and a final send-off from Trump. Several Republicans credited the administration for a large drop in violent crime in 2025 and a historically low murder rate, framing it as a turnaround from Biden’s time in office. Violent crime had been falling for several years after a spike during the 2020 pandemic, and criminologists said many factors could be involved and the exact reasons were unclear.

Kennedy falsely claimed Democrats closed every church in the country for a year during the pandemic. Restrictions on religious gatherings were implemented by both parties and typically capped attendance rather than prohibiting services altogether, and many ended within months. Trump vowed to end no cash bail, misleadingly saying that under the policy someone who kills someone is out in the streets two hours later. In states with cashless bail policies that almost never happens. Vance made the dubious claim that US citizens account for all of the job growth during the current administration, a specific federal employment data point experts said was misleading. Johnson inaccurately claimed Republicans inherited record high inflation from the Biden administration; the annualized rate had declined to 3 percent when Trump entered office, a lower rate than it is now. Trump falsely claimed he built almost 2,000 miles of border wall; the actual number is about a third of that, and only if including replacement wall.

The Rural Health Ads

As the midterms approached, ads supporting Democrats and Republicans made competing claims about how President Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy law would impact rural healthcare. The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act made changes to Medicaid, including new work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks for certain working-age adults starting the next year. The law is expected to cut federal Medicaid spending by around $900 billion over a decade and increase the number of people without insurance by 10 million, including 7.5 million from Medicaid, according to projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The $50 billion for rural health, known as the Rural Health Transformation Program, was a late addition meant to shore up support from wavering Republican lawmakers who worried Medicaid reductions would be especially hard on providers in rural areas. The fund allocates $50 billion over five years for one-time investments, and states apply for the funds with half distributed evenly and half based on rural population and facilities.

GOP ads highlighted the fund while ignoring larger cuts. In Iowa’s 1st Congressional District an ad from the American Action Network said Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks secured millions for rural hospitals. An ad in Colorado’s 8th Congressional District urged voters to thank Republican Rep. Gabe Evans for voting to pass the biggest investment ever in rural healthcare. An ad backing Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan celebrated the fund as the biggest investment in rural healthcare in American history. An ad in Ohio said Republican Sen. Jon Husted supported a $200 million investment in rural hospitals.

What none of those ads mentioned is that the same law’s cuts to Medicaid are expected to far outweigh the money rural hospitals receive. KFF estimated the OBBBA would reduce federal Medicaid funding for rural areas by $137 billion over ten years. An analysis by Manatt, commissioned by the National Rural Health Association, estimated the hit to rural hospitals alone could come to $57 billion. A Medicaid expert said those cuts could squeeze hospitals as people lose coverage and hospitals absorb more losses from treating uninsured patients, and limits on financing mechanisms could result in hospitals getting paid less for treating Medicaid patients.

Access to healthcare is a major issue in many rural areas, where people tend to have worse health outcomes and experience barriers including shortages of healthcare professionals, long travel times, financially strained hospitals and gaps in essential services like maternity care. Experts said it’s impossible to predict how many facilities might close as a result of the law.

The Distraction Play

The convention speech closed with familiar defiance. Trump continued to push the falsehood that he won the presidency three times, claiming numerous people on the other side are actually admitting it. He lost the 2020 election, and some of his own aides in his first term told him his claims of election fraud were baseless.

The ban on three outlets came as Republicans confronted a difficult electoral map and as California moved to protect its elections from federal interference. On Sunday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of bills aimed at bolstering election security, including measures to safeguard vote by mail and make seizing ballots or election records a felony. Newsom singled out the vote-by-mail measure as a safeguard against efforts to restrict the practice, which the administration claims is rife with fraud. The US Supreme Court had recently blocked the administration’s proposed changes to vote by mail, including a mandate for states to submit lists of approved voters to the US Postal Service.

Newsom said the future of democracy is on the line and that California will stop interference at every opportunity. Secretary of State Shirley Weber said no one should doubt the degree of resolve in protecting democracy.

The same week, thousands gathered outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to protest plans for the facility. The crowd streamed in from the nearest subway stop, crowding streets in Foggy Bottom and locking down traffic as they walked, many carrying signs, joining Hands Around the Kennedy Center. Some held hands and formed a human chain around the center.

Protesters talked about the importance of the center as the pinnacle of the nation’s performing arts world. One volunteer said the loss of performances has already been heart-wrenching and recalled the shock of seeing the East Wing altered overnight. A mother from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts described how students had borrowed costumes from the Washington National Opera for performances at Duke Ellington and performed on the center’s Millennium Stage, opportunities now gone.

The administration said it was willing to save the center, which it said was losing money, and said it could save it easily but questioned raising money for the rest of its life without recognition. A judge had ordered the Kennedy Center to provide 30 days’ notice before making any major physical changes to the building, including demolishing it.

The week ended with the president announcing the creation of an AI Force to monitor technology and an AI czar, a response to critics who had called for caution. He also repeated that fears surrounding AI are a hoax and vowed the administration will not hinder or stifle growth of the industry. He predicted AI is the next industrial revolution and will be even larger than the internet.

In September 2026 the press crackdown, the convention claims and the midterm ads all arrived together, a set of moments that showed how misinformation and the fight over who gets to speak are now inseparable from the campaign itself.