President Donald Trump has long had an antagonistic relationship with the press. He famously popularized the phrase “fake news” and has called reporters “the enemy of the people.” Yet the president is also more accessible to reporters than his recent predecessors, making media appearances on roughly 80% of his days in office during stretches of his second term and taking far more shouted questions and interviews than Obama or Biden ever took.
It’s a contradiction that defined Monday: a president who grants extraordinary access on his own terms, and revokes it entirely when the coverage displeases him. And at New York’s Gracie Mansion on Monday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made sure to portray a different scene to the press.
