A photograph that came to symbolize Donald Trump’s political comeback may have played a role in a much bigger dispute between the White House and the press. According to sources, the president wanted control over the rights to the now-famous image of him raising his fist, blood on his face, moments after he was attacked in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024.
The AP wouldn’t hand them over, and not long after, the wire service found itself locked out of the Oval Office and Air Force One.
The photograph has shown up on campaign merchandise, official materials and even inside the White House itself, where reports indicate a painting depicting the moment replaced Barack Obama’s official portrait in the State Floor foyer. For a president who has leaned hard into the image as a symbol of his political survival, owning the rights to it outright would have meant controlling exactly how, when and where it could be used, without having to rely on the AP’s cooperation.
That cooperation never came. And according to reports, the fallout wasn’t limited to a quiet licensing dispute. New York Times reporters wrote that “soon after his inauguration, the White House banned The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One, ostensibly because the wire service would not call the Gulf of Mexico by Mr. Trump’s preferred name, the Gulf of America.”
That was the official line. But the reporters point to another factor entirely: “Another reason for the ban: The A.P. would not give the Trump team rights to its photo of Mr. Trump, bloodied with a raised fist, after he was sh0t in Butler, Pa., in 2024.”
Notably, the Times report states that White House aides made that connection themselves, telling network anchors at a private lunch with Trump that the photo dispute played into the AP’s exile, according to two people who were briefed on the conversation. In other words, the naming dispute over a body of water may not tell the whole story of why one of the country’s largest news organizations got frozen out.
The White House hasn’t budged from its public explanation. Communications Director Steven Cheung has defended the administration’s approach to the press in sweeping terms, arguing that “biased reporting from the media is a disservice to the American people.”
He has also pushed back on the idea that reporters are being shut out, saying the administration gives the press “unprecedented access.” At the same time, Cheung has made clear the White House sees itself as playing enforcer against outlets it considers dishonest, saying, “We utilize every tool available to ensure that accurate reporting is provided to the public and the stain of those who knowingly peddle false information is held accountable.”
The AP situation, as it turns out, is just one thread in a much larger pattern the Times report lays out. Reporters Without Borders now ranks the United States 64th out of 180 countries in its press-freedom index, the lowest the country has ever placed since the ranking began in 2002.
Clayton Weimers, who leads the group’s North America division, described a steady drumbeat of pressure on the press, saying, “There’s not a week that goes by where they’re not taking a new step to curtail press freedom in the country.” He added, “We have measured a substantial diminishment of press freedoms.”
The examples pile up quickly. The Justice Department has sent FBI agents to reporters’ homes to serve subpoenas, and in at least one instance used a warrant to seize a journalist’s devices.
At the Pentagon, the editor and publisher of Stars and Stripes were removed from their posts, and journalists who declined to sign reporting-related pledges found their access restricted.
Funding for public television and radio has been slashed. The White House has also taken direct control of what used to be an independently run press pool, and Trump himself has filed suits against several major news organizations.
The pressure hasn’t stayed confined to traditional newsrooms either. Comedians and late-night hosts have been swept into the same fight, including Jimmy Kimmel. Separately, a federal judge found that a Federal Trade Commission investigation into the media watchdog group Media Matters amounted to, in the court’s words, “a straightforward First Amendment violation.” ABC, meanwhile, has accused the Federal Communications Commission of running what the network called a “retaliatory campaign” against it.
Trevor Timm, who runs the Freedom of the Press Foundation, put the scale of it bluntly, saying the administration’s actions “have certainly risen to the level where they’re kind of off the charts.”
Not every legal effort has gone the administration’s way. The Justice Department eventually withdrew a set of subpoenas targeting the New York Times, a reversal the paper’s newsroom lawyer, David McCraw, welcomed as “an important affirmation of our country’s commitment to a free press.” McCraw didn’t mince words about how he viewed the original subpoenas either, saying they “should never have been issued in the first place.”
Courts have stepped in elsewhere too. Ruling on the Pentagon’s press restrictions, Judge Paul Friedman invoked the framers’ own reasoning for protecting journalists, writing that “those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech.”
First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams argues that the legal protections themselves haven’t weakened, but the willingness to test them has grown bolder. “We live in a different world under this administration because the threats are so grave,” he said. Abrams cautioned that strong constitutional language only goes so far without enforcement: “It’s one thing to say there’s an extraordinarily powerful First Amendment, but unless and until courts rule on these matters, the threat is very real.”
