US President Donald J. Trump points his finger as he makes an announcement on healthcare in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., US, September 18, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci
President Donald Trump identified The New York Times and The Washington Post as the next news outlets in his sights Friday, in the aftermath of banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House and warning that other outlets would follow.
Asked what he meant by others to come, Trump named both papers immediately.
"The New York Times is fake news. Washington Post is fake news," he said. "They're crummy papers, both doing very poorly."
He then described a step short of expulsion.
"We're probably not going to display the paper anymore in the White House, those papers. But we haven't taken the step of throwing them out."
Trump pressed on in harsher terms, calling the Times "so fake" and the Post "disgusting," a word he repeated.
"I don't get it. Why would they be? You know, we're doing so well," he said, arguing both outlets take positive stories and render them as negatively as possible.
As he moved to the next question, a voice in the room could be heard responding to his earlier defense of press freedom.
"Only free when you agree with it?" the person started to ask.
Trump did not engage, saying only, "No, no, please," before taking another question.
The remarks came during an extended exchange in which the president defended the ban on three newsrooms while insisting that a free press is among the foundations of a country, alongside secure borders and fair elections. Pressed on why he had expelled the outlets, he said there was no particular reason beyond accumulated frustration with their coverage.
Trump is currently suing the Times for $15 billion. A federal judge struck his original complaint in September 2025 as "decidedly improper and impermissible," ordering it cut from 85 pages to 40, and Trump refiled the following month against the paper, three of its reporters and Penguin Random House. In July, Judge Steven Merryday deferred the Times' motion to dismiss and ordered another amended complaint. The Times has called the suit meritless and an attempt to stifle independent reporting.
Trump Media and Technology Group separately sued the Post for $3.8 billion over a 2023 story about Truth Social's financing. A federal judge in Florida threw that case out in July, finding the company failed to produce evidence a jury could use to establish actual malice.
The Post maintains a running tally of his legal actions against news organizations, which also include the BBC, ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal and the Des Moines Register.