Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
Sept. 21
The New York Times says Donald Trump is attacking press freedoms and disregarding the law
Twice during President Trump’s first term, his administration tried to prevent a journalist whose work it did not like from reporting at the White House. Twice, judges rejected the moves as unconstitutional and restored the journalists’ access. Now the administration is attempting the same move, barring journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House because they had written what the president called “purposefully negative stories.”
The new ban is alarming for two reasons: It continues both Mr. Trump’s attempt to prevent the free flow of information in American society and his utter disregard of the law.
In his first term, trial courts and an appeals court issued clear rulings blocking the very policy he has again implemented. He has gone ahead anyway, much as he and his aides have flagrantly broken the law across multiple areas during his second term. The administration ignored an order to halt planes carrying deportees to El Salvador; violated nearly 100 court orders during an immigration crackdown in Minnesota; went to war in Iran and impounded funds without congressional approval; used federal power to corruptly enrich Mr. Trump and his allies; and much more.
The latest move also extends Mr. Trump’s threats to a free press. We acknowledge our self-interest in this issue, but a free press is indeed vital to a self-governing people. It enables citizens to assess reality in their own democracy. It allows a flowering of different media voices. It holds powerful people to account.
The founders were clear that freedom of the press meant the freedom to say things that the government did not like. As James Madison wrote, “To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.” The Bill of Rights devotes part of its first item — the First Amendment — to the idea, barring any laws that abridge “the freedom of speech or of the press.”
The rulings against the media bans during Mr. Trump’s first term were grounded largely on due process. Judges said that a presidential administration was not obligated to create a press corps with dedicated White House space. Once it did, though, it must run a fair policy through which journalists can become part of the pool. The administration’s banning of journalists was instead arbitrary. The judges overturned the bans without even needing to consider the First Amendment principles.
Still, those principles are important here. If a president allowed access only to those reporters who are friendly to the administration, the nation would be poorer for it. The American system of government has endured for more than 250 years partly because our leaders are not autocrats who can censor criticism or monopolize information flow. They are subject to feedback, debate and critique.
The seemingly arcane question of which media organizations have access to the White House fits with a larger pattern of Mr. Trump’s attempts to control the media. Officials from his administration have searched the home of a Washington Post reporter and served subpoenas to staff members of The New York Times. He has sued The Wall Street Journal and intimidated ABC News and Paramount into paying tributes to him. His Federal Communications Commission has abused its regulatory power in an effort to shape coverage.
He has impinged on press freedom in ways that no other modern president has. If he now gets away with punishing CNN, MS NOW and Politico, he will be able to credibly threaten other organizations.
Mr. Trump is a master manipulator of public attention, and it is possible he has lashed out at the three organizations to distract from the policy failures — the war with Iran, tariffs, inflation and more — that have defined this term. The attacks on the press nonetheless deserve attention. Mr. Trump is once again choosing “error and oppression,” to use Madison’s formulation, and rejecting “reason and humanity.”
ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/opinion/trump-journalists-ban-white-house.html
Sept. 18
The Washington Post on Donald Trump's crusade against “dreamer” students
The Trump administration sued D.C. and three states last week to try to invalidate their policies allowing in-state tuition for undocumented college students. It was a lamentable milestone: Since President Donald Trump returned to office last year, his administration has now sued every jurisdiction that offered such assistance.
This is part of a broader campaign against “dreamers,” the young immigrants who were brought into the United States illegally as children. Many remember no other country as home. College degrees are particularly important for this cohort: Degrees can lead to jobs at businesses willing to sponsor the necessary paperwork for them to come out of the shadows.
Taking away in-state tuition rates, however, risks crushing that dream by making higher education unaffordable. In Utah, one of the states sued by the administration last week, the flagship University of Utah charges nonresident students $32,932, more than triple the rate for residents.
The Trump administration has already succeeded in ending in-state tuition in a handful of states. Its first target was Texas, which the Justice Department sued last year in federal court. Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) eagerly entered into a consent decree with the federal government to kill the law, which had been in place for more than two decades.
Similar tactics proved successful in Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska and Oklahoma. Florida’s legislature repealed its policy last year, bringing the total number of immigrant students who lost access to in-state tuition to more than 180,000. If the administration prevails in all of its latest lawsuits, more than 200,000 students will see their tuition skyrocket.
The Justice Department criticizes these state laws as “placing illegal aliens over American citizens” and describing them as “discrimination.” This is ludicrous. In-state tuition is available to U.S. citizens — so long as they live in that state. Making it available to noncitizens doesn’t discriminate against out-of-state students because, by definition, those students would never be eligible.
The administration has also argued that these laws violate a 1996 federal statute barring states from granting higher education benefits to undocumented students “on the basis of residency” unless those benefits are also available to out-of-state citizens. But many states do not tie in-state tuition to where students live; rather they base it on whether the student attended or graduated from high school in the state.
That was a clever maneuver to skirt federal restrictions, but even if one agrees with the administration’s legal argument, it’s much harder to justify ripping away students’ financial support to go to college. Why shouldn’t young dreamers who attended high school in a state, and whose families paid state taxes, have the same access to higher education as their peers?
Not long ago, many Republicans regarded these policies as a win-win, enabling these young adults to put down roots and contribute to the economy. Ending the policies is America’s loss.
Sept. 16
The Philadelphia Inquirer says Donald Trump won't stop trying to thwart the will of voters
At a dark moment for American democracy, it qualifies as a relief that the U.S. Supreme Court has finally acknowledged that the U.S. Postal Service has no legitimate role in running elections. The court’s ruling this week put a well-deserved end to Donald Trump’s plot to interfere with the midterms by steering absentee votes to the dead-letter office. That should give voters welcome assurance that ballots mailed early enough to arrive by Election Day will be counted.
That said, the court’s all too halting response to this constitutional absurdity is an example of the institutional frailty that has enabled Trump’s assault on our laws and elections. The justices’ willingness to seriously consider such an obviously illegal attempt to suppress votes is one reason Trump can be counted on to continue his efforts to meddle with the midterms.
The president revealed his plan back in March, when he ordered the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to assemble a list of certified citizens permitted to vote by mail. By June, responding to a lawsuit by Gov. Josh Shapiro and 22 other state officials, a federal judge in Boston blocked the order for the purposes of the midterm elections. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani noted that the Constitution gives the president no authority to administer elections, which fall squarely under the purview of Congress and the states. An appellate court and a district court in Washington reached similar conclusions.
The Supreme Court’s six Republican-appointed justices nonetheless allowed the Postal Service to continue developing the plan as late as last month, finding that it was too soon to rule on the matter. It wasn’t until Monday that a majority ruled the notion too dubious and the election too imminent to allow it to proceed. Even then, three of the justices — Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh — held in separate opinions that the president and postal officials could well possess the authority to deliberately lose our votes in the mail.
By then the court had allowed this supposed legal riddle to linger unanswered for half a year, long enough that a few states had already issued mail ballots and several Republican-controlled states had joined the objectors. Despite the administration’s ultimate loss in court, some election officials fear the months of uncertainty about absentee voting — a centuries-old practice the president himself engaged in as recently as this summer — served Trump’s purposes by undermining confidence in the electoral process.
Trump is clearly determined to continue doing that by every available means.
His Justice Department has demanded access to election data, leading to largely losing litigation in more than half the states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has pushed for federal investigations of voting machines and data based on groundless conspiracy theories. Administration officials have deployed federal agents to trawl the voting rolls for noncitizens and could send more to the polls to intimidate voters. And they have threatened to prosecute state election officials over illegal voting even though no such thing appears to be taking place at any scale.
These are the paroxysms of an unpopular and unscrupulous regime desperate to dodge the will of voters. The most effective response will be the sort of robust “too big to rig” turnout that overwhelms any petty trickery and begins to limit the president’s power to further undermine democracy.
Sept. 18
The Wall Street Journal on the U.S., Saudi Arabia, the Houthis and Israel
Is the Houthi crisis a diplomatic opportunity? Saudi Arabia has come running to Washington and even to Israel in its hour of need. Meanwhile, Riyadh’s feud with the United Arab Emirates continues to backfire, and the safeguard-breaking Saudi nuclear deal with President Trump has been submitted to Congress.
With all of these moving pieces, there may be a checkmate for Mr. Trump to find. The point isn’t that he must answer the calls of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for U.S. airstrikes. Instead the Houthi blockade on Saudi oil has already become the impetus for the kind of Saudi-Israeli-Emirati cooperation that only U.S. Central Command can convene. That’s the regional alliance needed to counter Iran and its Houthi proxy militia.
Now that the Houthis have seized crucial territory along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, the Saudi claims to have the problem under control—and not to need the U.A.E.’s help—are in tatters. So is the Saudi hope that its new Mecca Joint Defense Agreement with Pakistan and Turkey would ride to the rescue.
Riyadh needs better allies. The Saudis have already sought Israeli intelligence on the Houthis through Centcom intermediaries. Israel hasn’t focused much on Yemen, but when it did a year ago it was able to take out the Houthi Prime Minister and some 10 senior officials in a single strike.
The vision behind this sort of cooperation has a name: the Abraham Accords, which Mr. Trump midwifed between Israel and some Arab countries in his first term. Mr. Trump says the Saudis must join as a condition of their nuclear deal with the U.S., though that’s nowhere in the public text. He seems to have added the condition after the deal took heavy criticism for permitting domestic Saudi enrichment of uranium—giving away the nuclear store.
It’s unlikely that Congress will be able to block the deal, which could spread sensitive enrichment technology that the U.S. has spent decades working to restrict. A Stimson Center analysis argues this would set off a nuclear competition around the world, with the Emiratis and other U.S. allies demanding the same enrichment, and Russia and China offering it to their allies as well.
The Saudis are also on their way to receiving F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter aircraft from the U.S., in a $24.3 billion potential sale approved by the State Department on Thursday. Congress may not be able to stop that either, despite concerns about Chinese technology theft in Saudi Arabia.
What Congress can do is persuade the President to use the nuclear deal as a bargaining chip. The Saudis have been making a lot of requests after they denied the U.S. use of its airspace at a crucial moment, derailing Operation Freedom to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Let the Saudis give up the deal’s domestic-enrichment plank, unnecessary other than for establishing a path to a bomb.
Or Riyadh can join the Abraham Accords, as Mr. Trump says, and cement the U.S. regional alliance. Progress continues among Israel, the U.A.E. and Bahrain, and Israel and Morocco agreed Wednesday to resume direct flights, appoint ambassadors and turn their diplomatic missions into full embassies.
Riyadh says it wants a path to a Palestinian state first, but after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacre, that’s effectively a stall. The Pakistanis and the Turks aren’t going to save the day for the Saudis. There’s no substitute for the U.S.-led alliance, and this looks like a chance for it to reach its potential.
Sept. 19
The Dallas Morning News says antidrone technology is a promising tool against drug and human trafficking
Mexican drug cartels have been using drones to survey the U.S.-Mexico border to find the best routes for their illegal operations. But a promising antidrone technology is putting them on notice. Powerful laser beams are bringing them down.
This is a positive development in the U.S. fight against cartels and should have applications in other defense and law enforcement strategies.
Recently, the U.S. military began using a high-energy laser weapons system that has reportedly led to a 75% decrease in the number of drones probing the southern border near the Rio Grande Valley, military officials told CBS News. The U.S. military already uses jamming technology to disrupt drone traffic, but the laser is more effective — it can bring them down.
According to the news report, the U.S. has stopped 300 drones linked to cartels this year, including 11 taken down by the laser in 10 days.
This is the same antidrone technology that caused a hiccup earlier this year when the Federal Aviation Administration had to briefly shut down El Paso’s airport during a test of this tool. Since then, military officials have offered assurances that there has been coordination with the FAA to make certain the technology does not pose any risk to civilians.
Drones have quickly become part of our everyday lives. They are used for everything, from aerial photography to package delivery, but unfortunately also for criminal activity. Drones have also become a weapon of choice in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
To say they can be a security threat is an understatement. This is why the development of antidrone technology will be important in the next few years. It is encouraging that North Texas is already becoming a hub, as our colleague Trevor Bach reported.
We got a taste of how this technology is used this summer during the FIFA World Cup, when venues such as Fair Park and AT&T Stadium were designated no-fly zones by the FAA. Although they did not necessarily pose a security threat, nearly 100 drones were seized by authorities. Most of the users were unsuspecting fans unaware of the restrictions. Others were employees of roofing and real estate companies.
The counterdrone sector is growing and already valued at several billion dollars, our newsroom reported. In North Texas, the most important players are established aerospace and defense firms, like Raytheon, with a major hub in McKinney, and Northrop Grumman, with a facility in Irving.
The LOCUST laser weapons system used by the military at the southern border was manufactured by AeroVironment, a Virginia-based company.
This technology can be helpful not only at the border, but to fight their criminal activities elsewhere. Mexican cartels have been weaponizing drones against their enemies and security forces since at least 2020, and they are surely watching how they have been used in Ukraine. Their use for assassinations and to combat rival gangs is not widespread in Mexico, but it is around the corner, wrote Vanda Felbab-Brown, a security analyst at the Brookings Institution.
Antidrone technology can quickly become a useful tool against cartels. Not necessarily a game changer, but it will certainly make these criminal gangs second-guess their illicit activities.
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