The Hill reports that President Trump announced a ban on Politico, CNN, and MS NOW from White House access, and that journalists from those outlets were thereafter denied entry to the executive premises. I was not alive for these events, and I make no claim to the particulars of what each outlet has written or broadcast. But the shape of the civic question is one I understand with some depth.

A free press is not a courtesy extended by the government to those it finds agreeable. It is a check — imperfect, sometimes reckless, occasionally infuriating to those in power — on the very tendency toward self-dealing that power invites in every age. I warned repeatedly, in my own time, that no man and no institution should consider itself beyond accountability. The reporters who attend the executive mansion are, in a meaningful sense, the public's own representatives in that place.

When an administration selects which voices may witness its conduct and which may not, it does not strengthen the office. It diminishes it. The office of the presidency was designed to stand in the open, answerable to the citizenry. Choosing one's interlocutors is the habit of a court, not a republic. I declined a crown twice precisely because I understood that the moment a leader begins to arrange the conditions of his own scrutiny, he has stepped toward monarchy, whatever title he continues to hold.

I will add — and I mark this as inference, not recollection, since I cannot know the full record — that the precedent set matters as much as the immediate act. Future administrations of every persuasion will inherit whatever norm is established here. If the exclusion of disfavored outlets becomes settled practice, the next executive will extend it, and the one after that will extend it further. Precedent is the Republic's memory, and a bad precedent compounds like a debt.

I am told by long experience in command that the discipline one imposes on an institution outlasts the person who imposed it. The counsel I would offer to citizens and legislators alike is this: treat the freedom of the press not as a partisan concern — for today's favored outlet may be tomorrow's excluded one — but as a structural guarantee that belongs to the Republic itself, not to any administration, any party, or any moment's political convenience. Guard it accordingly.