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CNN’s chief political correspondent Dana R. Bash criticized the Trump administration’s new restrictions on reporting in the Pentagon, calling them “ridiculous” during an Institute of Politics Forum on Wednesday night.
Bash’s comments came during an event moderated by Nancy R. Gibbs, the director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, that covered the media’s challenges reporting on the second Trump administration and the shift away from traditional news outlets.
The new Pentagon policies severely curtail media access to the military complex. They include a provision that threatens to revoke press badges from reporters who disclose classified or even some types of unclassified information. Reporters with several media outlets, including CNN, have handed in their press badges rather than accept the new restrictions.
But, Bash said, her “colleagues who cover the Pentagon have still been able to break news.”
Bash, who has covered multiple presidential administrations as the anchor for CNN’s Inside Politics, said the unrelenting flood of breaking news during the second Trump presidency has forced her and her team to regularly adjust their program last-minute.
“By the time we get to air at noon, we have changed things most days, many, many times,” Bash said. “And then while we are on the air, we change things.”
That has been a stark change in pace compared to covering the Biden administration, Bash said, adding that if anything her team was “rusty because Joe Biden worked at the opposite speed.”
Bash also recounted moderating the first 2024 presidential debate between Trump and Biden, who stumbled through his responses in a shaky performance that inflamed concerns about his age. Bash said she was taken aback by Biden’s performance — and was quickly convinced that it could spell the end of Biden’s campaign.
At one point when Biden mistakenly said the U.S. had “finally beat Medicare” in a particularly awkward gaffe, Bash said she handed her colleague, Jake Tapper, a note saying that Biden had just lost the election.
“We didn’t anticipate that this would be a problem — that the president of the United States would just, I don’t know, just kind of melt down during the event,” she said.
During the talk, Gibbs also asked Bash about how she approached covering the “No Kings” protests last weekend, which saw millions of Americans take to the streets to criticize the Trump administration for what they view as authoritarian overreach.
Bash said that while some Republicans predicted that the demonstrations would turn violent ahead of the weekend, the protests turned out to be overwhelmingly peaceful.
“What we saw was a sea from coast to coast of peaceful protests with a few exceptions, but very few,” Bash said, adding that Republicans had only hurt their image by raising the prospect that the demonstrations could become violent.
“I think that Republicans ended up setting themselves up for this becoming a bigger news event than maybe it even would have been, because their predictions didn’t happen,” she said. “And I would argue now, in the narrative warfare, they lost.”
