Few public figures have more avidly tended their relationships with the media than Donald Trump. For four decades he has courted the press to promote himself and his enterprises. Yet when the coverage doesn’t go his way, he can retaliate with lawsuits and childish fits of pique.

As the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and quite possibly a future leader of the free world, Mr. Trump might reasonably have been expected to seek a more evolved relationship with the fourth estate. Far from it. Beyond his regular Twitter blasts against reporters or commentators or outlets that displease him, he is accumulating a lengthy blacklist of news organizations banned from covering his campaign events. He recently added The Washington Post to a group that already included Foreign Policy, Univision, The New Hampshire Union Leader, The Des Moines Register, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, Fusion, BuzzFeed News and Gawker. The Post’s sin was a headline suggesting that Mr. Trump had insinuated that President Obama was complicit in the Orlando shooting. Mr. Trump did indeed imply that, many times. But he called The Post “dishonest.”

In reality, of course, no one would be more miserable than Mr. Trump if these bans actually resulted in less coverage of his campaign — and if he is deluded enough to imagine they’ll result in less honest coverage, he will be quickly disabused. As a practical matter, the bans are essentially meaningless, since reporters can enter these events with the public, free from the corral where reporters with credentials are penned up and serve as an occasional target of his mockery.

Mr. Trump’s annoyance is not without precedent. Presidents have often sparred with the press, some have found ways to retaliate, and all seek in one way or another to control the political story line or duck cross-examination. Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump’s likely Democratic opponent, has not held a news conference in months.