JD Vance says Trump’s White House media ban is ‘totally appropriate’ as networks halt TV pool coverage in response – live | Trump administration
‘I think it’s totally appropriate,’ says JD Vance on Trump’s White House media bans
JD Vance defended Trump’s ban of three news outlets from the White House while speaking to reporters en route to a campaign event in North Carolina.
“He’s not banning media outlets,” Vance said on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. (Trump, in his social media post announcing the move, referred to his actions as a ban.)
Vance continued: “What he’s doing is saying we’re not going to give you special access to the White House if you engage in what is effectively propaganda.”
He criticized the outlets for coverage that he said was overly negative of the Trump administration.
“That’s not representative of the American people. It’s not representative of public opinion. So if you’re going to engage in what is effectively far left propaganda, why would a Republican White House give you special access?”
But, he said, Trump’s actions didn’t violate the outlets’ rights, because “they can still report on the Trump White House, they can still get the public reports” and “they can still, of course, talk to people in the administration and outside the administration”.
“It’s about basic fairness. They can still report. They still have access to free speech. They’re just not going to get an office in the White House anymore. And I think it’s totally appropriate, unless, of course, they start to behave like real news organizations.”
Key events
It appears the media boycott of President Trump in response to his banning of several news outlets from the White House has expanded from video coverage to include still images.
On Monday afternoon, The Washington Post said in a statement posted to social media that it would not publish any photos of Trump until midnight.
“The Washington Post will not publish any photographs of today’s presidential events – including Trump’s departure from the White House and his events at the United Nations in New York – until midnight Eastern Time, joining a collective effort with photographers in other newsrooms covering the White House in a show of support of the banned outlets.”
It was unclear which other outlets, if any, had joined the Post’s roughly 8-hour moratorium on sharing images of the president.
Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s happened today:
Three news outlets sued after Trump blocked them from the White House. If you missed it, Trump on Friday announced a surprise decision to ban Politico, CNN and MS Now from the White House, citing unfavorable coverage of his administration. On Monday, the three outlets, as anticipated, filed a lawsuit to restore their access.
The other White House TV pool members paused coverage of Trump in solidarity. The pool, for the uninitiated, is a rotation of five major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, and the recently axed CNN) who take turns following the president day-to-day and sharing their collected footage with other outlets. After Trump’s decision to nix CNN, the other four outlets agreed to cease covering the president as per usual, so far leaving Trump bereft of his usual tag-along camera crew.
Some key Republicans are pressing their president hard on war-inflated diesel prices. As the war in Iran continues to jack up the price of diesel — the fuel that runs America’s semi trucks, tractors, and heavy machinery — some influential Republicans are coming out publicly to pressure the president to take more drastic action. Republican senator Chuck Grassley called for an embargo on diesel exports. And Republican congresswoman and Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson called for measures to tamp prices and bring an “immediate” end to the war in Iran.
Trump is beginning a busy week of diplomacy. Trump is heading to New York to attend the United Nations’ annual convening of world leaders. While there, he’s expected to meet with a number of key heads of state, including the US-backed interim president of Venezuela, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and possibly the leaders of Iran. But first, Trump will be meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a political opposite with whom he’s so far maintained a strange rapport.
An ICE agent shot a DoorDash driver in Austin, Texas, on Sunday. The shooting — just the latest in a string of shootings by ICE agents enforcing the Trump administration’s deportation crackdown — prompted protests in the Texas capital.
At UN, Trump looks to lean on Zelenskyy to agree to energy ceasefire with Russia
Andrew Roth
Donald Trump is expected to press Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy on an energy ceasefire during a face-to-face meeting this week during United Nations high-level week, as world diesel prices have soared due to the war in Iran, as well as Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Ukraine stepped up its attacks on Russia’s energy sector over the weekend, launching its largest reported strike yet on the Moscow region in a barrage that struck a major Moscow oil refinery and killed three people.
On Monday, Trump said the whole world was suffering due to an energy shortage that he said was being exacerbated by the war in Ukraine.
“Russia has unfortunately lost control of its Diesel Oil Industry due to its War with Ukraine,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Monday morning. “A large number of their Diesel refineries have been blown up and are, at least temporarily, out of commission.”
“This ridiculous and never ending War with Ukraine must be ended,” Trump said. “The whole World suffers as 25,000 people, mostly soldiers, are being killed each month. What a shame!”
Trump had earlier blamed Kyiv for the escalating energy war even as Russia has decimated Ukraine’s economy and launched night barrages of drones and ballistic missiles against Ukrainian cities.
Zelenskyy on Monday said negotiations were continuing and that that there are “ideas on the table for bringing peace closer, starting with strong de-escalation steps”.
“Ukraine’s energy sector, critical infrastructure, and our food exports must stop being targets for Russia, and this will lead to matching de-escalation steps on our part,” he said in a statement. “Solutions are possible.”
The two leaders are expected to meet on Tuesday during a rare sitdown on the sidelines of the high-level week of the United Nations general assembly. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov will also be in Washington this week, and is expected to meet with secretary of state Marco Rubio.
During a trip to Ireland last week, Trump directly addressed Zelenskyy, saying he has to do “one thing: he has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia”.
“Let him go after targets but not diesel fuel, because he’s causing a shortage,” he said.
Trump spoke with Zelenskyy on Sunday in a phone call that one senior Ukrainian official told the Financial Times was about “diesel, diesel, diesel”.
Average diesel prices in the United States hit a record $6.50 per gallon on Monday, up from $3.19 per gallon this time last year before the US and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran and Tehran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz to most international trade. The rise in prices is seen as a liability for Trump’s Republican party in the US midterm elections, which will take place in November.
Trump is expected to deliver a speech to the UN general assembly on Tuesday morning, and is expected to meet with major energy producers including the Gulf Cooperation Council and Venezuela’s recently installed leader Delcy Rodriguez.
In a preview, Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN, said Trump would speak about how he has “confronted complex problems head-on around the world. Many of the peace deals that he has driven to conclusion, or is in the process of driving to conclusion.”
Trump last week prematurely announced an energy ceasefire under which Ukraine had agreed not to hit Russian energy targets and that “Russia has agreed to do likewise!” The deal had not been agreed, however, and Russian strikes against Ukrainian energy and other critical infrastructure have continued.
After a ribbon cutting ceremony not covered by the standard White House TV press pool, Trump boarded Marine One, en route to New York City for a planned meeting with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and, later, French President Emmanuel Macron.
The White House streamed video of Trump’s remarks. However, the audio was too distorted to make out what he said.
Iowa GOP Senate candidate calls for “immediate end” to Iran war
Ashley Hinson, a Republican member of the House of Representatives campaigning for a valuable Senate seat in Iowa, publicly called for an end to the war with Iran in a social media post on Monday.
“Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran,” Hinson wrote. “We need to use every option at our disposal to provide some relief from high prices.”
After listing some potential policy measures to mitigate the costs of diesel fuel, she added: “These actions to lower costs are needed ASAP, and the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end.”
While Hinson didn’t name Trump outright, her comments diverge from the oft-repeated stance of a president who has said the high prices are a worthwhile setback to bring Iran’s leadership to heel.
Hinson, once a steady ally of Trump, has drifted further from the president in recent weeks. When JD Vance, a key surrogate for Trump on the 2026 campaign trail, headlined a rally in her state last week, Hinson was notably absent. Her comment also comes as Republicans worry that the unpopular conflict will hamstring the party in the midterm elections and help secure control of one or both chambers of Congress for the Democrats.
‘I think it’s totally appropriate,’ says JD Vance on Trump’s White House media bans
JD Vance defended Trump’s ban of three news outlets from the White House while speaking to reporters en route to a campaign event in North Carolina.
“He’s not banning media outlets,” Vance said on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. (Trump, in his social media post announcing the move, referred to his actions as a ban.)
Vance continued: “What he’s doing is saying we’re not going to give you special access to the White House if you engage in what is effectively propaganda.”
He criticized the outlets for coverage that he said was overly negative of the Trump administration.
“That’s not representative of the American people. It’s not representative of public opinion. So if you’re going to engage in what is effectively far left propaganda, why would a Republican White House give you special access?”
But, he said, Trump’s actions didn’t violate the outlets’ rights, because “they can still report on the Trump White House, they can still get the public reports” and “they can still, of course, talk to people in the administration and outside the administration”.
“It’s about basic fairness. They can still report. They still have access to free speech. They’re just not going to get an office in the White House anymore. And I think it’s totally appropriate, unless, of course, they start to behave like real news organizations.”
Key ally urges Trump to back US farmers amid anger over rising prices
Ariana Baio
Donald Trump is facing growing calls, including from within his own party, to boost support for US farmers as his administration faces mounting anger over its treatment of the agricultural sector.
Republican senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa called on the US president to place an embargo on diesel exports this weekend and help farmers grapple with high prices.
Grassley, who is largely aligned with Trump, suggested the embargo in multiple social media posts, calling on the president to issue a 1970s-style embargo on diesel and agricultural products to help farmers.
“If our [government] can embargo chips to China it can embargo diesel to help American farmers & truckers,” Grassley wrote on Sunday. “We need our family farmers who feed&fuel the world [to be] on the strongest footing possible no matter what’s happening across the globe.”
For months, farmers – traditionally a reliable Republican voting base – have been angry with the Trump administration because they believe some of its policies adversely affect them.
That includes tariffs, which have driven up the cost of fertilizer, machine parts, seed and more; increasing beef imports to lower prices for Americans, which undermines domestic producers; and the Iran war, which has made it more expensive for farmers to operate machinery and transport products.
The national average cost of diesel was $6.51 as of Sunday, according to AAA. In Iowa, it was slightly lower at $6.31 – still nearly $3 more than the cost one year ago.
Gas prices are not the only rising cost Americans are facing as a result of the Iran war. Groceries have also become more expensive, and the Trump administration has sought to lower some of those prices, particularly beef, by allowing 300,000 metric tons of overseas beef trimmings to enter the US at a reduced tariff rate.
But domestic farmers in the US, who are already struggling with smaller herds, say the decision will increase competition and make it more difficult to sell their own.
“It takes something big to change long-established voting patterns, but I think there’s a possibility that the Trump administration has done things that are big enough and bad enough from the standpoint of rural America to make some of the voters who shifted a decade ago reconsider their choice,” William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Sun.
US strikes on alleged drug boats may constitute ‘crimes against humanity’, UN finds
Tiago Rogero
South America correspondent
A special rapporteur for the UN human rights council has concluded that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that the United States attacks on boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Pacific and Caribbean “constituted crimes against humanity”.
The boat strikes, carried out since September 2025 on the stated grounds of stopping drugs being trafficked by sea to the US, have killed more than 230 people. The latest, on Saturday, killed four people in the Caribbean.
The UN itself, along with several human rights organisations, lawyers and international law experts, had already described the bombings as “extrajudicial killings”, but special rapporteur Ben Saul went further.
In a briefing note posted by Saul on social media on Sunday night and first reported by the BBC, Saul wrote that, in addition to “serial extrajudicial killings”, the attacks were “in violation of the right to life, being unjustified in national or personal self-defence or under international humanitarian law, the international law of the sea, narcotics suppression conventions, or international counter-terrorism law”.
He added: “There are reasonable grounds to believe that the reported 68 attacks that killed 223 people constituted crimes against humanity of murder under customary international law.”
The report cites 68 US attacks that killed 223 people. It is unclear how recently the figures were updated – tallies by organisations such as the Washington Office on Latin America put the death toll at 234 people in 66 attacks.
US Southern Command, which has coordinated the attacks, posted on Saturday, alongside a grainy video, that it had “executed a lethal, kinetic strike on a go-fast vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean. Confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel’s active involvement in narco-trafficking. The operation killed four narco-terrorists”.
As has become standard in announcements of such attacks, the US did not identify the victims or provide any details about the alleged intelligence that supposedly confirmed their involvement in drug trafficking.
Saul’s report rejects the claim made by Donald Trump before Congress that the strikes amounted to “self-defence” against “designated terrorist organizations”.
The special rapporteur wrote that the crews were not “militarily armed and possessed the intent and capacity to launch military attacks” against the US.
“Even assuming that the vessels and crew attacked were members of the criminal groups listed as terrorist, such organizations have not mounted any ‘armed attack’ on the United States so as to trigger a right of self-defence,” he added.
The US Department of State has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Here’s our full report:
Lauren Boebert slams ethics complaint alleging sexual relationships with three staffers as ‘politically motivated’
Richard Luscombe
Lauren Boebert, the firebrand Colorado Republican congresswoman, is the subject of a House ethics complaint that she had sex with three staff members, and paid one to keep quiet. She said the allegations are untrue, and part of a “politically motivated” campaign against her.
Boebert’s denials came through a formal statement from her office, which said “the congresswoman rejects the claims as utterly false”, and a verbose video rant on social media in which she accused the person who filed the document as a “sloppy, desperate, obsessive hack”, and journalists who reported the story as falling victim to a “scam”.
According to the complaint, filed last week by David Wheeler, an independent journalist, activist, and founder of the American Muckrakers political action committee, Boebert committed at least seven violations of House ethics rules.
Among the most prominent allegations are that Boebert conducted a four-year “romantic and sexual relationship” with a senior female staffer, named as Clarice Navarro Ratzlaff, then paid her $200,000 when Ratzlaff broke off the affair and threatened to file an ethics complaint of her own.
Additionally, Wheeler alleges, Boebert had a sexual relationships around the same time with Raven Finegan, a congressional employee and the congresswoman’s district chief of staff, and Jeffrey Small, who was her chief of staff from 2021 to 2025.
The code of official conduct prohibits House members from engaging in sexual relationships with employees under their supervision, or the committees on which they serve, unless a couple is married. Consent, the rules state, is not a defense.
Boebert frequently promotes her own Christian values and has previously been publicly critical of same-sex relationships.
JB Pritzker – the governor of Illinois, an expected contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, and one of the country’s heftier political figures – revealed to CBS on Monday that he’s been using GLP-1s to shed weight.
Pritzker told CBS Mornings that he began taking GLP-1s after receiving a diabetes diagnosis two years ago. Since then, he said he’s lost 80 pounds.
Pritzker’s weight has been a source of jabs by political opponents, including President Trump, with whom he has sparred repeatedly during Trump’s second term.
(When pressed by an interviewer on whether he lost weight in part to reshape his image ahead of a presidential run, Pritzker equivocated.)
