The Trump White House’s press problems just keep getting worse

[Commentary] The message — if you are really bad at reading the signs — is that President Donald Trump and the people who support him believe they are at war with the media, plain and simple.

It's beyond an adversarial relationship. It's a desire on their part to extinguish what they believe to be the corporate-controlled, liberal media once and for all. From a political perspective, it makes sense for Trump to villainize the press, since the media is a stand-in for virtually everything that Trump supporters dislike about Washington specifically and “elites” more generally. But from a healthy democracy perspective, the attempts to change the rules — or turn the daily interactions between the president and the media into a game of favorites — is a very dangerous thing.