What Trump’s declaration of war on AP really means

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President Donald Trump’s standoff with the Associated Press over its refusal to abide by his executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico isn’t a benign dust-up between a global media institution and a stubborn president. It’s a deliberate and carefully targeted strategy of media intimidation.

When the AP announced that its stylebook would continue recommending using the “Gulf of Mexico” instead of “Gulf of America” because it is an international body of water and Trump’s order carries authority only in the US, the organization essentially formalized its disagreement with Trump. He couldn’t handle that, so earlier this month he barred AP reporters from White House events. On Friday, the AP sued.

It’s easy to shrug this off as just another annoying Trump preoccupation. But it is part of a larger pattern — one that includes booting NBC, NPR, Politico and the New York Times from their offices in the Pentagon and forbidding State Department employees from subscribing to media outlets including the Economist, Bloomberg News and Reuters.

Here’s why this should matter to the general public. The American system of government has always relied on the consent of the governed, and presidents have been hamstrung in the past when public opinion turned against them. A free and independent media plays a key role in that bargain. Gathering facts, reporting on dissenting opinions, and uncovering government misconduct often has a way of turning public opinion against those in power. That’s why the Founders wrote protections for a free press into the Constitution.

The AP essentially codified dissent into its stylebook. Trump knows he doesn’t have to target every critic to silence dissent, so his attack on AP serves two purposes: It gives Trump a perfect excuse to trigger the kind of retaliation envisioned by the Project 2025 authors when they suggested the president “re-examine the balance between media demands and space constraints on the White House.” It’s also an easy way to warn other news organizations that they’ll lose access unless they get on board.

The ultimate goal isn’t to give mapmakers a bunch of business. It’s a strategy to keep the inconvenient truths about government out of mainstream public opinion. And it’s a strategy that works. I lived through a mini version of it in Florida during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gov. Ron DeSantis iced out reporters, stocked his news conferences with cheerleaders and DeSantis proxies, shielded the public from timely data about coronavirus outbreaks, and elevated fringe medicine.

Former Florida Surgeon General Scott Rivkees, who served from June 2019 to September 2021, says that during the first year of the pandemic, DeSantis and other Republican governors mostly took similar approaches to Democratic governors. “They had lockdowns. They paused schools temporarily. They promoted vaccination.” But in May and June of 2021, when cases had been going down and before the Delta variant took off, “a split occurred,” Rivkees told me.

The Republican governors “decided we have to get COVID off the news so people don’t see the number of cases, the number of deaths that happened,” he recalled.

Following directions from the governor’s office, the Florida Department of Health started reporting COVID cases and deaths weekly, instead of daily — at the end of the day on Friday when the DeSantis administration hoped it would get the least amount of attention, Rivkees said.

The move had deadly consequences, Rivkees wrote in a paper. People didn’t have the timely surveillance data they needed to get vaccinated as the virus spread through their towns, he said. Florida went from one of the lowest COVID-19 mortality rates in 2020 to a death rate double the national average In July 2021.

DeSantis hired a media team whose job was not to answer questions but to troll anyone who had the audacity to voice or print a criticism of the governor. They stocked news conferences with members of a handful of right-leaning news sites and rewarded them with access to often cherry-picked and misleading news.

Opposition to DeSantis’ authoritarian tactics started to weaken. Florida’s shrinking statehouse press corps moved on. Lawsuits ultimately forced the administration to release data it had refused to make public. But by then it was too late. As DeSantis was selling anti-Fauci koozies and T-shirts, people died preventable deaths.

Rivkees has urged his public health colleagues to learn a lesson from Florida’s decisions. But there is broader lesson here, too, for Americans and their press: Information is power.

Corporate owners of some of the largest media sites have been caving to pressure from Trump to silence criticism. Disney, ABC and Meta have all settled lawsuits over defensible news decisions. Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, is reportedly prepared to settle Trump’s baseless lawsuit alleging that the network interfered with the election. And Trump’s appointee to the Federal Communications Commission is launching investigations into legal activities at NPR, PBS, Comcast, NBC and a San Francisco radio station.

In his 1973 book, The Politics of Lying, journalist David Wise had a chilling warning about what can happen if government intimidates the media into distorting facts and silencing truth.

“The consent of the governed is basic to American democracy,” Wise wrote. But “if the governed are misled, if they are not told the truth, or if through official secrecy and deception they lack information on which to base intelligent decisions, the system may go on — but not as a democracy.”

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.