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Why It Matters Who Asks the Questions

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 02 › press-pool-trump-white-house › 681868

Kim Jong Un stared blankly as I spoke.

The North Korean dictator was seated across a small table from President Donald Trump, the two leaders and their entourages tucked away in a meeting room of a luxury hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam. It was their second summit, this one in February 2019—an event that the United States hoped would de-escalate the threat posed by the rogue nuclear nation, and one that Trump had told aides might yield him a Nobel Peace Prize. But I wanted to ask the president about something on the other side of the globe.

“Mr. President, do you have any reaction to Michael Cohen and his testimony?” I asked from a few feet away.

Trump scowled and shook his head. Kim didn’t react. The dozen other American reporters who were there and I were abruptly pulled from the room. And when the summit later adjourned without a deal, Trump blamed the stalled negotiations on the distractions caused by Cohen, his former lawyer, who had appeared before a Democratic-led congressional committee back in Washington hours earlier and delivered explosive testimony in which he labeled Trump a “racist,” “con man,” and “cheat.”

Trump later told aides on Air Force One that he didn’t like my question. And, certainly, he had the right to respond to it however he saw fit or to choose not to respond at all. But most important was that I had the ability to ask it at all—that a journalist, protected by the freedom of speech, could directly challenge the president about any subject of his or her choosing.

[Read: The day Trump became un-president]

I was able to do so that day only because I was part of what’s known as the White House press pool. Established during the Eisenhower administration, the pool is a small, rotating group of journalists who stand in for the rest of the press corps when security or space limitations prevent a larger number of reporters and photographers from being present—for example, in the Oval Office, on Air Force One, or, in this case, in a small room in Vietnam. Across generations of Democratic and Republican presidencies, the pool system has, with remarkable speed, kept the American public informed about what the president is doing on a daily basis.

In his first term, Trump went along with the system. But this week he made clear that he no longer would: The White House press secretary announced that the administration would disband the daily rotation, long coordinated by the White House Correspondents’ Association, and instead handpick which journalists would be allowed to follow the president.

That change might seem trivial to many Americans—just a Beltway-insider controversy or a fight among celebrity correspondents jockeying over who has access to the president. But it represents a dangerous moment for American democracy. If, as it has begun to do, the White House gives preference to Trump-friendly outlets, it will restrict the ability of fair, independent journalists to hold some of the most powerful people on the planet to account and to expose the president’s actions and decisions.

“Our job is to push the president beyond his comfort space to respond to questions that otherwise they’re never asked,” Peter Baker, the longtime New York Times correspondent who has covered the White House since 1996, told me. “Now he’s sending a signal that If you write something we don’t like, you’re out. You don’t get to be here anymore.”

The announcement this week follows the White House’s recent banishment of the Associated Press from the pool and White House events after the outlet refused to go along with Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” AP journalists have been allowed to keep their hard passes, security clearances that allow them access to the White House campus. But they are clearly being punished by the president for the words they use to cover him. The White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents the journalists who report on the day-to-day doings of the president and works with the West Wing to facilitate press access, objected to the decision. The AP, in a statement, said the move “plainly violates the First Amendment” and is suing the White House over the ban; a federal judge this week did not offer an immediate ruling but also did not restore the outlet’s access, causing the Trump administration to claim “victory.” (I worked at the AP for eight years, including while on that presidential trip to Vietnam, and am a member of the WHCA.)

[Read: Intimidating Americans will not work]

By overriding the entire pool system, the White House has now gone one step further. The WHCA represents nearly 300 news organizations—from a wide range of ideological viewpoints, including conservative ones—that are accredited to cover the president. It has long determined the identities of the outlets and reporters in the pool with no input from the White House. About three dozen outlets rotate, on an alphabetical basis, pool duties at the White House; a smaller number participate in what’s known as the travel pool, following the president when he leaves White House grounds, because of the costs involved. (The media organizations themselves cover those costs, not taxpayers.) When he travels, 13 journalists—a mix of correspondents, photographers, and technicians—go along with him (because that’s how many seats are in the press cabin of Air Force One). When the president is at the White House, the number increases slightly. In both cases, those in the pool send out information through reports that are distributed directly to the other members of the WHCA.

On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the White House would no longer use the WHCA’s rotation. The next day, Reuters joined AP in losing its scheduled shift; Blaze Media, a conservative outlet making its debut in the pool, and Axios—one of the few outlets to adopt the “Gulf of America” name—were allowed in. Today, two more partisan, right-leaning outlets—One America News and The Federalist—received pool slots. And a reporter from the Russian state news agency TASS was allowed to gain access to today’s Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while the AP and Reuters were not. That reporter was later removed by staffers for “not being on the approved list,” according to the White House.

“This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” Eugene Daniels, the president of WHCA’s board and a Politico correspondent soon leaving to host an MSNBC show, said in a statement earlier this week. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

The mere presence of the pool is important; its reporters stand poised at just about any moment to provide the nation with real-time updates on the president’s actions and health. The pool is there if the president travels to Boston or Beijing or just up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. It has been on hand for some of the nation’s most historic moments, including when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas and when George W. Bush was scrambled into the Florida skies after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center. It has been there when presidents made unannounced trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. And it’s there for mundane moments too, with reporters sometimes sitting for hours in vans while the president golfs.

The pool’s purpose is not just stenography about what the president says or a daily diary of what he does. Pool reports, compiled by independent journalists and untouched by any government officials, are often full of answers to unsparing questions posed by pool reporters. Trump feeds off media attention and, at times, enjoys going back and forth with reporters. He is accessible to the press and answers far more questions than his immediate predecessors. But most of the questions he fields are in spontaneous sessions with members of the pool, in the Oval Office, in the Cabinet room, or on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. He takes far fewer questions in larger news-conference settings with the full press corps, and he doesn’t regularly sit for one-on-one interviews other than with friendly, right-leaning interlocutors.

If the pool is now stacked with right-wing journalists, Trump will face fewer challenging questions, a blow to transparency and Americans’ ability to keep tabs on the most powerful person in their government. Ron Fournier, who covered the White House for the AP for more than a decade beginning in 1993, described such a system to me as “state media.”

[Read: The free-speech phonies]

“That is not a democracy,” Fournier said. “If this precedent holds, every future president will want the same deal.”

The changes to the pool system are all the more worrying because they are part of a larger attack on the press from the White House. No president likes his media coverage, but no one before Trump has made the press such a part of the story. Trump has long deemed journalists “the enemy of the people” while deriding institutions and individual reporters (me included), and he has successfully inspired fear in the Fourth Estate. His litigation prompted ABC to pay $15 million to his presidential library in a settlement. His Federal Communications Commission has opened investigations into PBS, NPR, and the parent company of NBC. Trump threatened this week to sue members of the media over anonymous sources, claiming that “a big price” should be paid for stories he doesn’t like. The Pentagon has told reporters that it will eliminate its own pool that travels with the defense secretary. And before taking office, Trump’s FBI director mused about targeting journalists he believes have covered the president unfairly.

The WHCA circulated a letter this week that was signed by 39 outlets protesting the changes to the pool. Some right-leaning organizations, such as Fox News and Newsmax, signed the letter, warning that a future Democratic president might exclude conservative media outlets. Newsmax’s owner, Chris Ruddy, made that case to Leavitt yesterday, a person familiar with the meeting told me. The press secretary was unmoved by the argument, the person said. (Ruddy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) She has stated publicly that the changes to the pool will allow a more diverse set of outlets to cover the president. In response to a social-media post from Baker, the New York Times correspondent, criticizing the move, Leavitt wrote, “Gone are the days where left-wing stenographers posing as journalists, such as yourself, dictate who gets to ask what.”

Members of the WHCA board continued negotiations with the White House yesterday. Reporters have speculated that Trump will get bored of softball questions from friendly outlets or that the White House will tire of shouldering the logistics of staging press events without the WHCA’s help. Some of the White House correspondents I have talked to in recent days have floated the idea of boycotting covering Trump events in protest, but others, including members of TV networks, have pushed back on the idea. Among the fears: that a boycott could cause the White House to fully stock the pool with sycophantic outlets, or to disband it completely.

Some rank-and-file WHCA members have also advocated for canceling the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the annual black-tie celebration of the First Amendment scheduled for late April, because of the bad optics that would be produced by scenes of correspondents mingling with administration officials who have cut back on press access. But calling off the event would deprive the organization of its best yearly opportunity to raise money for journalism scholarships and operating expenses. For now, the dinner is on.

Although presidents are always invited, Trump did not attend the event during any of his first four years in office. A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, told me that Trump had not decided whether to attend this year’s dinner, but that many of his aides were urging him to go—“to make clear that he owns you.”

The Man Who Would Remake Europe

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › international › archive › 2025 › 03 › germany-friedrich-merz-election-cdu › 681887

Hours after his election victory last Sunday, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), said on national television that he would try to “achieve independence from the U.S.A. I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program,” Merz continued, but “it is clear that the Americans … are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

American security guarantees have protected the Federal Republic of Germany since 1945. Never since then has a chancellor of that country suggested that it emancipate itself from Washington. Not even France’s Emmanuel Macron, who has called for building a “sovereign Europe” capable of defending itself since he was first elected in 2017, could have put the imperative in starker terms. So who is the incoming German chancellor making this transformative demand?

Merz is a conservative by any measure—social, fiscal, political—and far from being the avatar of a freethinking new generation in Germany, he may wind up being the last chancellor to hail from the old one. But history has plans for him. He will likely step into the highest office of Europe’s biggest economy and most powerful state just as the United States, under Donald Trump, abandons its post–World War II role on the continent. Merz, with his right-wing instincts and establishment roots, will be guiding his country, maybe even the continent, through a period of epochal change.

Already, Merz has pledged to increase defense spending and put Paris, Warsaw, and London at the lead of a new policy to shore up Ukraine’s sovereignty and defend Europe from Russia with or without the United States. He has even sought to explore whether France and Britain might extend their nuclear umbrella to the rest of Europe, in place of American protection. At any other time, this agenda of European self-reliance might be a radical one. Now it’s a logical response to events.

When he takes office, most likely at the end of April and at the helm of a coalition government with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Merz will not be riding a wave of enthusiasm. The CDU won just 28.6 percent of the vote in this election—almost eight points more than the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the second-worst showing of the party’s history. And Merz has a personal reputation for being cocky, ambitious, and overly cerebral. He’s a politician with hard edges, and many Germans, especially women, find him hard to like.

[Read: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

At 6 foot 5, the incoming chancellor literally looks down on most people he talks with. He is also a self-made multimillionaire who describes himself as “upper middle class” yet flies his own private propeller plane. He is a former artilleryman in the Bundeswehr who likes authority and orderliness, and he has a taste for cashmere V-neck sweaters and checkered shirts. Once, when a TV crew was following him for a day, he admonished an employee to brush their hair.

The postwar generation to which Merz belongs has governed Germany for decades. Its men and women were raised amid the country’s immediate moral reckoning with the horrors of the Nazi Reich, and they have made this imperative central to their vision. Merz’s grandfather was a Nazi brownshirt and the mayor of Brilon, a picturesque town in the country’s west where Merz also grew up. Two generations later, Merz has watched the rise of the far-right AfD with profound concern, calling it a “disgrace for Germany.”  

Merz’s life in Brilon was economically comfortable but not always easy or orderly. As a child, he spent six months in a tuberculosis clinic run by nuns—an experience he has dryly described as “not nice at all.” His sister was killed in a car crash at age 21. And he was an impatient and irascible teenager who had to leave his local high school for disciplinary reasons, and whose grades were so bad that he had to repeat a year.

Merz’s political career has been similarly jagged; he has probably survived more defeats than any other living German politician. A former judge, he rose to prominence as a member of Parliament in the 1990s as the standard-bearer for the conservative camp within the CDU. Yet in 2000, Merz lost a bid for party leadership to an unassuming East German named Angela Merkel. Once she became chancellor, Merkel made a point of marginalizing her most threatening rival.

Merz left politics in 2009 to make money—lots of it. He joined a law firm in Düsseldorf and sat on the boards of many big corporations, including prestigious investment firms such as BlackRock Germany, of which he was chair, as well as run-of-the-mill companies such as the toilet-paper producer WEPA. Nine years would pass before he returned to politics. By then, in 2018, Merkel was engulfed in criticism for having let nearly a million refugees into Germany from the Syrian civil war. Within minutes of her announcement that she would step down from the CDU leadership, Merz had a statement ready announcing his candidacy. But the CDU didn’t choose him—at least, not at first. Twice, it picked centrists in the mold of Merkel. But the party kept losing electoral ground. Finally, in 2022, its members saw fit to give Merz a chance to revive the CDU by shifting it to the right.

[Read: MAGA has found a new model]

Merz favored a politics of law and order and a relatively hard line on immigration. He has at one point even advocated declaring a state of emergency in order to push migrants back from Germany’s borders, something European Union law would otherwise prohibit. Only weeks ago, he passed a parliamentary motion calling for placing undocumented migrants awaiting deportation in closed facilities. This proposal got through only because it won the votes of the AfD. Merz had earlier promised never to work with the far-right party. Now he told critics that if the AfD wanted to vote for his proposal, he could hardly prevent it.

Some of Merz’s rhetoric around immigration sounds a lot like that of the populist right. He once called Ukrainian war refugees “social-welfare tourists”—though he later apologized for it. He has also designated the sons of migrants who fail to respect female schoolteachers “little pashas.” If all this was meant to reduce the AfD’s appeal by moving the CDU to the right, however, it was a failure. His tough talk did not prevent the AfD from capturing almost 21 percent of the vote this year—double what it got in 2021.

Merz’s economic views may be the ones most starkly challenged by the geopolitical moment he finds himself in. To wrest European security from the North American framework will require new investments, new programs, and, almost inevitably, big spending. Merz brings to this task the instincts of a free-marketeer impatient with government outlay and bureaucracy. In the 2000s, he promised that if he became finance minister, he’d make the income-tax form, which in Germany runs to dozens of pages, fit on a beer tap. In 2008, the year of the global financial crisis, Merz published a book arguing that Germany should cut back its welfare state, deregulate its economy, and encourage people to buy more stocks instead of letting their savings languish in bank accounts. Germany’s economy has stagnated for the past five years, and most of Merz’s solutions to that seem to come at the expense of workers or the environment: reducing unemployment benefits, creating incentives for Germans to work longer hours, and rolling back climate regulation. With the auto industry in crisis, he advocates removing the EU ban on internal-combustion-engine cars that is supposed to begin in 2035.

But conservative economic orthodoxies may soon run up against other priorities, some of them every bit as close to Merz’s core. Like most German politicians of the immediate postwar generation, Merz is a Europeanist. He sees the EU not as a constraint but as a conviction. He is an ardent supporter of Ukraine, having criticized his predecessor, Olaf Scholz, for backing Kyiv too timidly and walking in lockstep with President Joe Biden instead of choosing a more assertive course with Paris and London. Scholz once marketed himself as a “peace chancellor,” to which Merz quipped: “Peace you can find in any cemetery. It is our freedom that we must defend.”

[Read: Is it time to bury Merkel’s legacy?]

Merz wants Europe to become sovereign and free of foreign interference because he believes that the new administration in Washington, like Moscow, seeks to divide and undermine democracy in Europe. The White House, like the Kremlin, seems intent on intervening in elections on behalf of the far right, and on forcing Brussels to walk back regulations on Big Tech that might curtail disinformation and hate speech. Countering this agenda, when it was only a Russian one, was well in line with conservative German values. On Sunday, the chancellor-in-waiting said: “I have absolutely no illusions about what is happening from America. Just look at the recent interventions in the German election campaign by Mr. Elon Musk … the interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow.”

Merz’s conservatism may be what allows him to shepherd Europe through a historic transformation. Just as the anti-communist hard-liner Richard Nixon was uniquely situated to establish American relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1972, and just as the left-wing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was best placed to cut back Germany’s welfare state in the 2000s, Merz, with his stodgy, center-right credentials and postwar pedigree, may be just the leader to get Germans and Europeans to spend big for their emancipation from the United States.