After what was surely a harrowing several hours for CNN, Donald Trump’s White House has already broken its silly boycott of the news network. Earlier today—as in, like, eight hours ago—we reported that a spokesperson for Trump’s administration had claimed that nobody on the president’s team would be appearing on CNN for the foreseeable future, saying that they would be “sending surrogates to places where we think it makes sense to promote our agenda” instead.
Press Secretary Sean Spicer claimed the CNN ban wasn’t official or permanent, just that the administration didn’t want to encourage a network that has “no desire to actually get something right,” but the Trump team’s insatiable thirst for attention has already forced it to abandon the boycott. As reported by Variety, a deputy assistant to Trump named Sebastian Gorka appeared on The Lead With Jake Tapper this afternoon, ending what could be one of the shortest boycotts of any kind ever.
As Variety points out, the Trump administration has been hesitant to send spokespeople to CNN ever since it took power, but these last few hours were the very first time anyone specifically said they wouldn’t speak with the network. Either way, Variety also notes that the network’s ratings have been just fine, so it probably doesn’t care. Maybe CNN has discovered some other, more straightforward way to find out what Trump’s thinking at any given moment?