Hello there. Welcome to another episode of the Chuck Todd cast. My guest today is Tara Palmer.

Tara somebody I've known as a colleague in political journalism, whether it was Politico, whether it's Puck.

And she's most recently gone independent. There's a lot of us that have recently gone independent.

There's a lot of us that have recently gone independent.

And there's plenty of explanations of why suddenly being an independent journalist feels a bit more liberating. And frankly, a place to be that makes it a bit easier to practice journalism.

Because I think right now, as you can see, traditional media is struggling to deal with Trump 2.0.

I think, for instance, it's been atrocious how traditional media has handled the Trump White House's attempts to kick the Associated Press, for instance, out of the

press pool, the inability of the press corps to unite together to sort of stand with AP

because the rationale the White House used to kick AP out of the press pool was unconstitutional.

You know, look, I'm not going to sit here and say they should protest over office space and all of this stuff.

But when the rationale for kicking AP out of the press pool is the way they describe the body of water that borders the states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.

The Gulf of Mexico, as the world calls it, and what America called it, up until about 60

days ago. And Gulf of America, which President Trump renamed via executive order,

the Associated Press made it clear they were sort of going to use both names at times, but mostly refer to it as the Gulf of Mexico, considering that they're an international news organization, et cetera.

The fact that the White House used that decision is the rationale to kick them out.

That's just simply unconstitutional, just like you can't fire somebody simply because of how they look, right? There are protections in the law for that. Well, the Constitution's

the ultimate protector on this one. So it's unconstitutional. A pretty simple thing to stand for,

principally. And yet there's not a single leader of a single tradition of media company that is willing to stick their head out on behalf of the Associated Press.

If anything, you saw certain competitive news organizations come out with their own decision on what they were going to call it.

And in some way, it was almost sort of not dissimilar to what happened with the Paul Weiss law firm.

Right.

When in the memo that the managing partner put out when he said, we sort of explained why they capitulated to the demands of

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