The White House’s grudge against CNN is, by now, Trump-era canon. In 2018, the White House famously revoked the press pass of Jim Acosta, CNN correspondent, for the journalistic sin of being too confrontational; Acosta’s credentials were not reinstated until a court ruled in the network’s favor. That same year, pool reporter Kaitlan Collins was banned from attending a White House event. And last fall, one of the president’s lawyers, Charles Harder, of Gawker-killing fame, pulled one of the administration’s most brazen stunts yet, threatening a “false advertising” lawsuit over CNN’s “Most Trusted Name in News” slogan. With the 2020 presidential primary officially kicking off this week, the president is ramping up his offensive against the so-called fake news, once again marking CNN as the outlet non grata. The network reported on Monday night that the White House was barring its anchors from the annual pre–State of the Union media lunch Tuesday, a drastic break in precedent.

Last year, CNN anchors Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer both attended the event, which on Tuesday included anchors from NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox News, and C-SPAN. Trump’s singling out of CNN suggests a renewed willingness to target specific outlets deemed hostile in the lead-up to 2020. (Clearly, the networks’s affirmative-action hires of former Trump aides and allies hasn’t been enough to soothe the West Wing.) Moreover, in the past week, Trumpworld’s petty, multi-front media offensive has also involved escorting Bloomberg’s White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs out of a Des Moines presser on Monday afternoon (the Trump campaign said it would ban Bloomberg reporters from its events after the media company’s namesake entered the 2020 race), and kicking BuzzFeed News’ Ben Smith, the outgoing editor-in-chief of a site the president called “a failing pile of garbage,” out of an Iowa campaign event Monday night.

Trump, it goes without saying, has purposefully eroded media relations while in office by doing things like ditching the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and axing regular press briefings. This is largely a continuation of the stance he took in 2016, when his team refused press credentials to nearly a dozen news outlets, including Politico, the Washington Post, and HuffPost, and he campaigned against the press almost as aggressively as he did against Hillary Clinton. When things are going well, he’s wont to accuse the media of refusing to give credit where it’s due; when they’re tanking, he whines about coverage that’s “very nasty” and “unfair.” In 2018, outlets from Fox News to NBC released statements in defense of CNN’s Collins after she was barred from covering a Rose Garden ceremony. But that type of collective action has been the exception rather than the rule as the president and members of his administration tangle with the press. (CNN’s banishment comes on the heels of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s hissy fit over a question from an NPR reporter, and his subsequent decision to remove a different NPR reporter from his plane.)

The recent string of retaliations from the Trump campaign is as good an indication as any that the president and his followers are planning more of the same as 2020 kicks off. And, maybe, more of worse: as Axios reported over the weekend, Trump feels more emboldened than ever, convinced that he’s untouchable, and that naysayers around him amount to so many “Chicken Littles.” Every day, per senior officials who spoke to Axios, Trump “grows more confident in his gut and less deterrable,” and the same can reportedly be said of the people who work for him. What this heralds for a new era of war with the press isn’t clear yet, but it probably isn’t good.

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