I

mean, this was always the question of how far was President Trump going to go with this ban? We have seen our journalists have their badges reinstated, but we've now seen them take multiple steps to try to ban us from other avenues of covering the president.

whether it was an event related to President Xi's visit, and then now we're hearing from CNN, they are saying that they were expected to be a part of the travel pool today as the president is traveling to Tennessee, and they are now being blocked.

And the White House puts out something called daily guidance, where they list the events for the day and which outlets will be covering them.

And how the pool really operates is it's a small group of journalists.

It's writers, photographers, producers, correspondents, and They represent the rest of the press corps.

And the idea is these spaces are too small, places like Air Force One or the Oval Office, for everyone who wants to cover the president to be in them.

Akilah, what are your sources in the White House telling you about how far this administration is willing to go, how far Donald Trump is willing to go here?

Tell us what it's been like.

Well, I arrived here a few minutes ago.

I showed the Secret Service agents a copy of the TRO and my passport.

They allowed me through those first two gates.

And once I got to the final gate, the security facility, I was able to get my pass back.

It didn't have the lanyard, but they did eventually give that to me.

The president has been very clear about what he wanted to do here.

Can you bring me into all the things that this White House is trying to pretend don't exist?

What can you tell us about that and what you were confronted with when you showed up at the White House just this morning?

Yeah, Jacob, I just saw that CNN reporter, Betsy Klein, she arrived here a few moments ago and we were waiting to hear word of whether she was able to get in.

And we can now, in fact, report that she was also denied.

But just to walk you through what happened this morning, this is 17th and Pennsylvania, right? To my left there is the first entrance that you must pass as press.

I showed my badge.

I said good morning to the officers, as I typically do.

There was no issues.

What are those same sources that you talk about, all of the issues that the American people actually care about, say about why you're staying on the street today and not and not inside the White House?

We're in a... [laughs] We started a war [laughs] in the Middle East, where, um, oil prices are set globally, and th- what is happening in the Middle East is affecting these prices at the pump, and the American people are clocking it, for lack of a better term.

Absolutely.

They're drawing a direct line between the war in Iran and gas prices, and something that I think is really interesting, these are the highest gas prices since 2022.

Continuously, I keep seeing metrics about the economy that keep pointing back to that year, 2022.

That's when inflation was 9% under Joe Biden.

Americans now say even though inflation is a lot better than it was, that they feel worse about the economy.

That's what the most recent consumer sentiment survey from the University of Michigan found.

Akayla, help me understand, what is the, what are you hearing from the White House about this? Why now do the American people need to fund the ballroom?

What do you make of what we heard from both Trump and Karoline Leavitt?

Leavitt?I mean, it's a huge caveat whether you know, it's by Iran's terms or President Trump's terms.

But I think what has been increasingly clear over what has been almost a week now of this ongoing conflict is every time the president talks about Iran, he's raising the stakes.

Before this conflict happened, it was about ensuring that they didn't have a nuclear weapon.

Now it's about destroying all of their naval assets.

It's about destroying their ballistic missiles and preventing their vast terrorist network from destabilizing the region, which is something frankly, that I still don't understand how that impacts the ceasefire agreement that was made in Gaza.

The president keeps raising the stakes here, but what is increasingly clear is he feels very proud of the operation so far.

This is not a good story for them.

But otherwise, this is the, the rate and you'll have to live with it.

Well, there's really major questions about this now because this is essentially what the president did in April.

They put out this list of rates that they were gonna apply to various countries, and then they pivoted and really made it seem as though they were gonna have these, quote, bespoke deals individualized for certain countries.

It certainly seems that's gonna be the case for some countries still, places like Japan, South Korea, potentially Australia, others that are really major trading partners.

Mexico, Canada could also be on that list.

But it seems like the rest of these countries could potentially just receive a letter, as Trump says, telling them what they expect them to pay.

There is one school of thought that says the baseline is going to be 10% across the board, potentially higher for some of those trader partners like China who have this really big and significant trading relationship with the United States.

Someone like Chip Roy who's been saying the deficit is just too high, I wonder how, i- if that argument now is, um, supported and buttressed in some way by Moody's move late in the day after the markets close, you know, lowering our rating basically because they're saying the debt is too high.