‘Trump’s evil plan is backfiring’ / ‘Happy Oligarch Day’ / A ‘mud ocean’

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‘Trump’s evil plan is backfiring.’ That’s columnist Heather Delaney Reese on the repercussions of the president’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House press pool.
■ Former USA Today editor-in-chief Ken Paulson, now director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, sees journalists and the president playing “high-risk chess with much at stake.”
■ A Tribune editorial (free link): “If Donald Trump won’t listen to this reason, those with thicker skin around said president should gang up on the boss and do all in their power to make him reverse course.”
■ In an occasion New York Times reporter Peter Baker calls “unprecedented,” Trump left the White House yesterday with no TV cameras tracking him …
■ … resulting in laughable video that even sycophantic Newsmax conceded shows Trump’s attack “backfiring.”
■ Columnist Jeff Tiedrich: “Silenced-by-the-media Donny is my favorite Donny.”
■ The New York Times (gift link): “Trump, for whom television is better than any narcotic, finds himself for the first time at least partially deprived of the major networks that have covered nearly every movement and utterance he has made for more than a decade.”
■ Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer praises journalists for fighting back, but wonders if it’s too little, too late. (Cartoon: Jack Ohman, who separately posts on “The State of American Political Cartooning, 2026.”)
■ All this could make for interesting coverage of Trump’s first Chicago-area visit of his second term—for the Presidents Cup golfing thing at the Medinah Country Club.
■ PolitiFact rates “mostly false” assertions that President Biden “cut off 440 reporters’ credentials.”

Weight, weight—he told us. Gov. Pritzker’s gone public with his use of the weight-loss drug GLP-1 to address his diabetes and lose 80 pounds …
■ … elaborating in his (yes, he has one) Substack email newsletter: “If you have struggled with type 2 diabetes or being overweight, I hope this can be the push you need to talk to your doctor again.”
■ Pritzker’s also dropped a bit in Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest people.
■ Columnist Eric Zorn mocks Pritzker’s use of the word focus “to avoid giving straight answers to perfectly reasonable questions” …
■ … and instead commends former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s approach.

‘There’s not one person more qualified.’ Visiting last night’s Daily Show—with Jon Stewart, who’s one of his clients—talent agent Ari Emanuel stopped short of saying his brother Rahm will run for the White House, but nevertheless said “he’d make an incredible president.”
■ Tribune columnist Rick Kogan calls Ari’s new memoir—in which he discusses, among other things, his ties to Elon Musk—“lengthy, if ultimately unsatisfying” (free link).
■ Popular Information: Musk “is blanketing the internet with digital ads falsely accusing Democratic Senate candidates of supporting ‘taxpayer-funded sex changes for kids.’”

‘Happy Oligarch Day.’ Columnist and monopoly monitor Jeff Stoller says a decision by the states (not including Illinois) that were suing to block the merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers cleared the way for Trump-aligned billionaires to take over Hollywood.
■ Tech watchdog and science fiction author Cory Doctorow: California’s attorney general “sold us out.”
■ A veteran studio exec tells The New York Times (gift link) the deal makes David Ellison “the Hollywood equivalent of Superman”—a character over which he’ll have control …
■ … if a judge signs off on the deal …
■ … which LateNighter says would put much of political late-night programming under one corporate banner.

Same joke, two ways.
■ Jon Stewart assembles evidence that Donald Trump is an AI entity …
■ … and Jimmy Kimmel suggests Melania Trump’s one, too.
■ Seth Meyers returned to NBC after a record seven-week break.

‘Say so if you’re not sure.’ Tech columnist Kim Komando recommends adding that phrase to artificial intelligence inquiries—to keep chatbots from inventing answers …
■ … specifically as you check smart-home gadgets like doorbells, thermostats and fridges for Chinese-made chips that “may enable data collection and remote access.”
■ Amazon’s blocking Facebook parent Meta’s AI agent Muse from doing users’ shopping.
■ Media critic Simon Owens warns media companies cutting staff right and left: “AI slop will not save legacy newspapers.”
■ Columnist and former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger: “AI could be dangerous. I am just as wary of the tech CEOs.”

‘If my children needed to be disciplined … as a Black father, I had to address it.’ A candidate for president of Chicago’s first fully elected school board is defending himself against—but not denying—charges he engaged in physical discipline that left his son scratched and bruised.
■ WBEZ, the Sun-Times, Chalkbeat and Block Club have teamed up to create a voter guide for November’s historic school board election.

A ‘mud ocean.’ A neighbor says Riot Fest 2026 left Chicago’s Douglass Park a quagmire.
■ Organizers say they’ll make things right.
■ At least fest-goers got outta town before a threatened strike by thousands of Chicago hotel workers.
■ Block Club: Chicago sewer overflows are on the rise as extreme weather piles on.

That’s three. Another beluga whale rescued from a failed Canadian theme park has died at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium.

■ … ending this season’s run of the phenomenon we’ve come to know as Chicagohenge.

Square mailbag. A reader troubled by a passage in yesterday’s Chicago Public Square writes: “Why didn’t you use the word neighborhood? This use of ‘the ’hood’ dogwhistle is surprising and quite disappointing.”
■ That reader’s note graciously ends, “I enjoy this newsletter and appreciate every one of them.”
■ Mike Braden made this edition better.

This means war / Unhappy anniversary / Square loses a reader

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This means war. Retaliating against President Trump’s White House ban on reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico—who are suing—ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News are canceling their pooled TV coverage of the president, under which they’ve rotated responsibility for generating footage carried by news organizations worldwide.
■ Poynter’s Tom Jones sees Trump’s move as “the kind of brazen and dangerous act that attempts to push America closer to countries that have state-run media.”
■ Former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger—a rare Republican who voted to impeach Trump: “While it may seem like a petty move by a petty man, this is a textbook move by authoritarians to choke out critical media.”
■ Radio news veteran Rob Archer says Trump’s act isn’t completely without presidential precedent.

So it’s not just about his ego? Trump says the big arch he wants to build between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery would also host ammunition supplies, drones and snipers.
■ Gary Legum at Wonkette sees it as “Toddler President’s … Super-Cool GI Joe Play Fort.”
■ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg: Trump’s “putting-your-name-on-everything hustle is a play right out of the ancient tyrant playbook.”

Unhappy anniversary. Block Club: A year after the first violent clash at the Broadview immigration detention center, immigration agents again pepper-sprayed protesters.
■ See it here—profanities included.

‘Quantum is not AI.’ A Tribune editorial (free link): The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park Gov. Pritzker’s championing for the former U.S. Steel South Works “will not be a collection of power-sucking, water-drinking data centers.”
■ Pritzker told ABC’s Jonathan Karl over the weekend that AI “essentially learns from itself and doesn’t need human beings anymore, and I think that’s what we all need to be concerned with.”
■ In a gesture some might see as poetic, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District is offering to sell AI data centers recycled sewer water.
■ Fear of sewer overflow amid weekend rain prompted cancellation of yesterday’s Chicago River Swim.

‘The government would like to revisit the whole don’t experiment on vulnerable people thing.’ Comedian and columnist John Fugelsang flags the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-led Health and Human Services Department’s consideration of changes to rules regulating medical research on humans.
■ Back on HBO after several weeks, John Oliver took a swipe at his Trump-allied corporate business daddy: “Having access to wealthy parents just cannot be the system to get badly-needed healthcare—even if it is apparently the system that lets you be in charge of HBO.”
■ The Onion on a report that one in three U.S. residents with health insurance nevertheless struggle with long-term medical debt: “If there was a better way to provide healthcare surely another country would have figured it out.”

Apple’s ‘alarming text.’ HuffPost says that if your iPhone flags “mercenary spyware,” it’s not spam: “It’s a real warning Apple users are getting that they should act upon quickly.”
■ Here’s the company’s detailed guide for what to do.

‘Back to the drawing board.’ Sun-Times architecture columnist Lee Bey says the plan for “an ungainly and unattractive” new entrance to the Museum of Science and Industry “threatens to foul up one of the city’s great urban vistas.”
■ The owners of the United Center have released details of plans for a new 6,000-seat music venue in the neighborhood.

Chicago Public Square loses a reader. An unsubscribe note following Friday’s edition objected to “Zionist mischaracterization of witch’s nose worn by Macklemore and illegal collusion by Robert Kraft to silence and demonize a courageous performer.”
■ We don’t expect every reader to agree with every opinion linked from Square, but we encouraged that (former) subscriber to read in full the pieces linked from that issue, as well as these links from Wednesday’s edition.
■ Opening a concert Saturday, Ed Sheeran commented on the dropping of Macklemore from his tour, calling the situation in Gaza “catastrophic and unjustifiable.”
■ Pulitzer-winning Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch (gift link): “Eagles’ silence on their role in the Macklemore mess has become deafening.”
■ Chris Koenig and Mike Braden made this edition better.

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