President Donald Trump is taking aim at CNN and MS NOW after the networks did not provide television coverage of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s elaborate White House arrival ceremony Thursday—a dispute that quickly became part of the spectacle surrounding one of the most closely watched U.S.-China meetings in years.
Trump unloaded on the networks in a Truth Social post, accusing them of refusing to cover what he described as one of the biggest and most significant events at the White House in years.
“CNN and MSDNC, to show you how fake they are,” Trump wrote, saying the networks refused to cover the arrival of Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan.
Trump continued by praising the ceremony as “magnificent” and “Actually made for Television,” while arguing that the networks did not want to give him credit for the event.
“Tonight’s State Dinner at the White House, for President Xi, will be spectacular!” Trump wrote.
But there was an important piece of context behind the missing television coverage.
CNN, MS NOW and Politico had been denied White House access earlier Thursday despite a federal judge ordering the administration to restore their press credentials. The dispute over access also affected the television news pool that normally provides footage of presidential movements to the major networks.
CBS News reported that the television pool did not cover the president’s movements Thursday morning because CNN had not been guaranteed a return to its regular position in the pool. Other major networks consequently declined to provide the usual pool video, even though news organizations continued reporting on Xi’s visit.
So the story was not simply that CNN and MS NOW decided they did not want to cover Xi.
The networks were caught in a larger fight over White House press access that had already reached federal court.
That distinction did not stop Trump from making the media dispute part of the day's political theater.
And the event itself was difficult to ignore.
Xi's visit marked his first White House visit in more than a decade, according to CBS News and the White House. Trump hosted an elaborate arrival ceremony featuring military demonstrations and an aircraft flyover before the two presidents held bilateral talks and prepared for the evening state dinner.
The stakes went well beyond ceremonial pageantry.
Washington and Beijing are still navigating trade tensions, tariffs, artificial intelligence, Taiwan, critical minerals and other areas of strategic competition. The two countries had also agreed to extend their tariff truce shortly before Xi's arrival.
The White House dinner brought together senior officials and prominent figures from the American business and technology worlds, turning the evening into both a diplomatic event and a highly visible demonstration of the importance Washington places on its relationship with Beijing.
The dinner itself went forward Thursday evening, with Trump and Xi exchanging remarks and the two presidential couples meeting with guests.
That leaves the media-access fight as a separate but increasingly prominent story surrounding the summit.
Trump sees the absence of CNN and MS NOW from the arrival coverage as evidence of what he calls hostile or unfair media treatment. The networks, meanwhile, have said the access dispute—not a decision to ignore Xi—was central to their absence from the television pool.
Either way, Xi's visit managed to produce two very different spectacles at the same time: an unusually lavish diplomatic welcome for China's leader and another increasingly bitter confrontation between the White House and major news organizations.
For Trump, the message is obvious: the Xi visit was too important to ignore. For the networks, the fight over who gets access to the president—and under what conditions—is now impossible to separate from the coverage itself.
