It’s useful enough to pin Trump down on that. But I think we also need to ask a broader set of questions that go further in trying to establish how President Trump might treat the news media.

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As my Post colleague Margaret Sullivan points out, Trump has, in addition to banning reporters, insulted journalists ceaselessly (“slime,” “scum,” etc.), raising this core question: “Does Donald Trump believe in the well-established role of the press in American democracy?” The way to answer this is to try to get Trump to be as specific as possible — beyond whether he’d revoke credentials for reporters who displeased him.

To gauge how far President Trump might go, it’s worth noting that in the wake of the Orlando shooting, he said he believes we are at “absolute war” with the enemy, which is “radical Islamic terrorism,” and, crucially, that much of this enemy is currently among us. Trump has explicitly said in the past that to combat this enemy, we will have to do things that we previously thought were “frankly unthinkable.” So, naturally, one useful question is how he’d treat news organizations in the context of this ongoing war.

Questions for Trump

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For instance, one good query for Trump might be: If as president you believe that a news organization is on the verge of publishing information that could somehow compromise the ongoing war on terror, would you rule out trying to use preemptive executive action to block such publication? Presidential administrations often try to privately talk news organizations out of trying to publish things they believe might compromise ongoing national security efforts. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has rightly been criticized for its aggressive prosecution of those who leak classified information to the news media.

But Steven Aftergood, an expert in government secrecy, notes that the question for Trump is whether he’d go considerably further than this, by actively seeking to block imminent press publication in advance.

In the Pentagon Papers case, when President Nixon unsuccessfully tried to use executive authority to halt ongoing media publication of documents about the Vietnam War effort, the Supreme Court established a standard which held that under the First Amendment, the government could not restrain publication unless it would “surely result in direct, immediate, and irreparable damage to our nation or its people.” One question is whether Trump would push against that standard, and try to block publication of information he deemed as a lesser threat, using a vague national security justification, pushing this back into the courts.

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“That Pentagon Papers standard is the right reference point,” Aftergood tells me. “It’s set in stone as much as anything can be. Under what circumstances would Trump seek to block publication of the news in the interests of national security or public safety? Is freedom of the press sacrosanct? Does the press have to cooperate with the Trump administration’s efforts to secure the nation? What steps would Trump take to limit reporting of national security, military, or domestic actions by the Trump administration?”

Along these lines, Ilya Somin, a constitutional law expert at George Mason University, suggests to me an even simpler question for Trump: “In wartime, should the government be allowed to suppress speech that people think expresses support for the enemy?” It would be interesting to press Trump on that question in the context of his belief that we are at war with a “radical Islamic terrorist” enemy that has widely infiltrated the homeland. What if President Trump deemed media coverage overly sympathetic to this enemy or overly compromising of efforts to defeat it?

Or take Trump’s now-well-known pledge to “open up the libel laws.” Trump continues to justify his banishment of news organizations on the grounds that they supposedly “make things up” about him, so they no longer have an justifiable right to access to him, even if he is a presidential candidate. In that context, Aftergood suggests another question for Trump: If a news organization reports something that President Trump deems false or defamatory, what options should be available to the president? “The right answer is ‘nothing,'” Aftergood argues. It would be good to get Trump’s answer.

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