Donald Trump

President Trump blasted the news media ahead of his return to Washington on Sunday after a 17-day working vacation. “Heading back to Washington after working hard and watching some of the worst and most dishonest Fake News reporting I have ever seen!” the president said.

The president has told aides that he’s removing his chief strategist. Steve Bannon has clashed for months with other senior West Wing advisers and members of the president’s family.

James Murdoch, the CEO of 21st Century Fox, has spoken out against President Donald Trump’s controversial reaction to the violence in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend. In a personal letter sent to friends and associates urging them to support the Anti-Defamation League, Murdoch called the violence, in which one woman was killed and 19 others were injured after a car plowed into counter-protesters at a white nationalist rally, and Trump’s response to it a concern to “all of us as Americans and free people.”

President Donald Trump’s contentious relationship with CNN took another turn Tuesday when the network refused to air a new campaign ad unless changes are made. The ad, entitled “Let President Trump do his job,” accuses the media of “attacking” the president as a collage of TV news personalities, including CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon, appears on the screen.

Hope Hicks will be named the new White House communications director. President Trump has offered the job to Hicks and she has accepted the position, according to a White House insider. Hicks has been close by Trump’s side since the early days of the campaign and is one of his most trusted staffers. She has been serving on the press team in more of a behind-the-scenes role as the director of strategic communications.

At a recent dinner at the White House with Jared Kushner and John Kelly, before President Trump decamped for a working vacation at his private golf club in Bedminster, N.J., the president listened while one of the guests, Rupert Murdoch, a founder of Fox News, said Steve Bannon had to go. Trump offered little pushback, according to a person familiar with the conversation, and vented his frustrations about Bannon. Murdoch is close to Kushner, who has been in open warfare with Bannon since the spring.

Media bashing has become one of the organizing principles of Donald Trump’s presidency. But behind the scenes, the Trump machine is eagerly promoting the nuggets of positive press they receive from the very outlets the president seeks to discredit.

Anthony Scaramucci wants to tell his own story. Following his departure from the White House after less than 11 days as communications director, Scaramucci will be hosting an online event on Friday where he will address the American people directly. Scaramucci said this daytime event — which will be available on various live platforms with help from former Fox News co-president Bill Shine — will give him the opportunity to reach and communicate with the President’s base.

The lawyer for a Washington private investigator who is suing Fox News over its use of allegedly invented quotes in a news story advancing a bizarre conspiracy theory said Tuesday he will seek to depose President Trump and former White House press secretary Sean Spicer to question them over their roles in the affair.

Bill Shine, a former co-president of Fox News and top lieutenant to the network’s founder, Roger Ailes, has spoken with White House officials about taking a position on President Trump’s communications team, according to several people briefed on the discussions.

President Donald Trump has removed Anthony Scaramucci as communications director, a little more than a week after the former financier was named to the post, three White House officials said on Monday. The change came at the request of new chief of staff John Kelly, who started Monday, the officials said. It was not clear whether he would take on a new role after leaving the communications job, nor was it immediately clear who would take over the position.

The new White House communications director has become obsessed with leaks and threatened to fire staffers if he discovers that they have given unauthorized information to reporters. He started his conversation with The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. It escalated from there into an obscenity-laden rant.

New White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci has fast become one of the most powerful people in the West Wing, putting allies of White House chief of staff Reince Priebus on edge.

Anthony Scaramucci, the flashy financier President Trump hired to overhaul the White House communications operation, is exercising a broad mandate from the president and intends to follow through on threats to purge aides he believes are disloyal to Trump and leaking to the press, officials with knowledge of the fast-moving effort said Monday.

Two besotted anchors. A president spurned. Love, Beltway style. (The Donald is not invited to their wedding.)

How the White House has tried to beat the press during Trump’s first six months in office. The president’s forays into press criticism have become voluminous. Fortunately, they’re as easy to track as ABC.

Spicer’s decision appears to be linked to the appointment of a new White House communications director, New York financier Anthony Scaramucci. People with knowledge of the decision spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the personnel matter publicly.

Anthony Scaramucci, a Wall Street financier and longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, has been engaged in talks to join the White House communications shop, two White House officials said. Scaramucci, who is a frequent TV surrogate for Trump, is liked by the president. Trump “thinks he is really good at making the case for him,” one of these people said. “He loves him on TV.”

Fox commentator Mark Serrano has been one of President Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters on air, but his financial ties to Trump were only disclosed after his company was paid $30,000.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai told lawmakers on Wednesday that President Trump has not tried to influence his agency’s consideration of the AT&T-Time Warner merger. In his reconfirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, Pai was repeatedly grilled about Trump’s attitude toward the press and whether it has affected the FCC.

Is this a temporary chill or a new page turned in the relationship between the media mogul and the President?

James Poniewozik: “Fox & Friends, the three-hour wake-up program on Fox News, is an interactive magic mirror for Donald J. Trump. He is the show’s subject, its programmer, its publicist and its virtual fourth host. The stars offer him flattery, encouragement and advice. When he tweets, his words and image appear on a giant video wall. It’s the illusion of children’s TV — that your favorite show is as aware of you as you are of it — except that for Mr. Trump, it’s real.”

Fox was busy today knocking down a story that it had selected the exiled Billy Bush to host its Top 30 newsmagazine, which is set to debut this fall. Bush has not been seen since losing his Today Show job last year after an audio tape of a bus ride he took with Trump emerged.

The Fox News Channel morning show has been credited or — depending on your politics — blamed for sending a onetime reality TV star to the White House by giving Trump a platform to riff on politics back when he was contemplating a run in 2012. And since the November election, Trump has rewarded that loyalty, appearing on the show and amplifying comments made by hosts and guests to his 33 million Twitter followers.

Concerned that the White House may meddle in the anti-trust review AT&T’s proposed $85 billion takeover of Time Warner, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked the Justice Department last Friday whether it had been contacted about the merger by any White House employee or adviser to the president.

After eight months of scrutiny by the Justice Department’s anti-trust regulators, the fate of the merger is still unclear. Among the reasons: Trump’s nominee to run the DOJ’s anti-trust division is still awaiting Senate confirmation and concerns that White House may weigh in given Trump’s antipathy toward CNN, one of Time Warner’s prized possessions.

In the past, presidents have often used foreign visits to preach the value of a free press. Not this president. 

As he prepared to meet with world leaders at the G20 summit today, President Trump waved off critics and the “Fake News Media” in his morning Tweets. “Fake News Media will never cover me accurately but who cares!,” says one.

National security officials across the federal government say they are seeing new restrictions on who can access sensitive information, fueling fears in the intelligence and security community that the Trump administration has stepped up a stealthy operation to smoke out leakers.

President Trump ripped CNN, again early Thursday morning in Warsaw during a joint press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda, saying, “They have been fake news for a long time.” He also said: “NBC is equally as bad despite the fact that I made them a fortune with The Apprentice — but they forgot that.”

President Trump, in a series of denunciations of CNN and a video depicting him wrestling it, is “trying to bully us,” said its president, Jeffrey Zucker. The president’s denunciations — in stinging tweets and slashing speeches, in phrases like “fraud news” and “garbage journalism” — have far outstripped his criticisms of other prominent news outlets. And his attacks have spawned a cottage industry of Trump supporters who have declared a digital war of sorts against CNN, including gotcha videos of network employees and threatening messages sent to anchors’ cellphones.

The latest: the network is defending itself against a #CNNBlackmail social media campaign.