She asked too many questions that the president didn’t like. She reported too much about criticism of his administration. And so, before long, Yelena Tregubova was pushed out of the Kremlin press pool that covered President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
In the scheme of things, it was a small moment, all but forgotten nearly 25 years later. But it was also a telling one. Mr. Putin did not care for challenges. The rest of the press pool got the message and eventually became what the Kremlin wanted it to be: a collection of compliant reporters who knew to toe the line or else they would pay a price.
The decision by President Trump’s team to handpick which news organizations can participate in the White House press pool that questions him in the Oval Office or travels with him on Air Force One is a step in a direction that no modern American president of either party has ever taken. The White House said it was a privilege, not a right, to have such access, and that it wanted to open space for “new media” outlets, including those that just so happen to support Mr. Trump.
But after the White House’s decision to bar the venerable Associated Press as punishment for its coverage, the message is clear: Any journalist can be expelled from the pool at any time for any reason. There are worse penalties, as Ms. Tregubova would later discover, but in Moscow, at least, her eviction was an early step down a very slippery slope.
The United States is not Russia by any means, and any comparisons risk going too far. Russia barely had any history with democracy then, while American institutions have endured for nearly 250 years. But for those of us who reported there a quarter century ago, Mr. Trump’s Washington is bringing back memories of Mr. Putin’s Moscow in the early days.
The news media is being pressured. Lawmakers have been tamed. Career officials deemed disloyal are being fired. Prosecutors named by a president who promised “retribution” are targeting perceived adversaries and dropping cases against allies or others who do his bidding. Billionaire tycoons who once considered themselves masters of the universe are prostrating themselves before him.
Judges who temporarily block administration decisions that they believe may be illegal are being threatened with impeachment. The uniformed military, which resisted being used as a political instrument in Mr. Trump’s first term, has now been purged of its highest-ranking officers and lawyers. And a president who calls himself “the king,” ostensibly in jest, is teasing that he may try to stay in power beyond the limits of the Constitution.
Some versions of this are not new, of course. Other presidents have taken actions that looked heavy-handed or put pressure on opponents. No president in my experience at the White House, which goes back to 1996, particularly liked news coverage of him, and certainly there have been times when journalists were penalized for their reporting.
After an article on whether Vice President Dick Cheney might be dropped from the re-election ticket in 2004, The New York Times found it no longer had a seat on Air Force Two. President Barack Obama’s team tried to exclude Fox News from a briefing offered to other networks, only to back down when the rest of the press corps stood up for Fox.
But those relatively contained disputes were nothing like what is happening now. The White House takeover of the pool — a rotating group of about 13 correspondents, photographers and technicians given close access to the president so they can report back to their colleagues — upends the way the president has been covered for generations.
The alarm has been felt by media outlets across the spectrum. Just as the other networks backed Fox against the Obama administration, Fox has backed The Associated Press against the Trump White House and its senior White House correspondent criticized the pool takeover. The precedent being set now, certainly, could be used by a future Democratic administration against media that it disfavored.
On Wednesday, the day after Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, announced the takeover, neither the A.P. nor Reuters, two mainstays of the White House press corps for decades, were included in the pool. Newsmax and The Blaze, two conservative outlets, were invited to take their places.
The rest of the broadcast networks remained, as did other traditional organizations like Bloomberg and NPR. The pool got a chance to ask Mr. Trump and his billionaire patron Elon Musk questions at the top of a cabinet meeting for about an hour, proof, according to White House aides, that they are not shielding him from scrutiny.
“A select group of D.C.-based journalists should no longer have a monopoly over the privilege of press access at the White House,” Ms. Leavitt said when she disclosed the takeover, casting it in populist terms. “All journalists, outlets and voices deserve a seat at this highly coveted table. So, by deciding which outlets make up the limited press pool on a day-to-day basis, the White House will be restoring power back to the American people.”
The move, of course, “does not give the power back to the people — it gives power to the White House,” as Jacqui Heinrich, the senior White House correspondent at Fox, put it on social media. Ms. Heinrich, who sits on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association, which had traditionally decided pool membership, said the group has long welcomed new voices.
All of this is taking place against the backdrop of a major shift in foreign policy as Mr. Trump pivots away from Ukraine and toward Mr. Putin’s Russia. In recent days, he has blamed Ukraine for Russia’s full-scale invasion of it in 2022. He also called its popularly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator without elections,” while offering no words of reproach for Russia or Mr. Putin. “He’s a very smart guy,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Putin on Wednesday. “He’s a very cunning person.”
Yevgenia Albats, a leading Russian journalist who had to flee her country under threat of arrest after the 2022 invasion, said the developments in Washington over the past five weeks resemble the early days of Mr. Putin’s reign.
“The oligarchs kissing the ring, the lawsuits against the media, the constraints on which media should be in the White House pool, and which are not — all that sounds familiar,” Ms. Albats said.
But she stressed that, unlike Russia, the United States remains a nation with important checks and balances, no matter how frayed. “There is one huge difference,” she said. “You have a working and independent judiciary, and we did not. And this is a hell of a difference.”
And this comparison to Mr. Putin’s Moscow strikes Mr. Trump’s camp as “hysterical,” as Ms. Leavitt put it online, an overwrought analogy by an entitled left-wing elite upset that its own privileges have been challenged by a president making “much needed change to an outdated organization.”
Russia was a place in transition when my wife and I first arrived in Moscow in March 2000 to help cover Mr. Putin’s first election and later returned at the end of the year for a four-year stint. The fledgling democracy that President Boris N. Yeltsin had constructed and handed over to Mr. Putin was deeply flawed, corrupt and increasingly discredited in the public’s eyes.
Economic tumult had cost millions of Russians their life savings and their sense of security, meaning that many equated the very word “democracy” with chaos and theft. But in those early days as Mr. Putin took over, it was still a relatively open and vibrant political environment, where opinions ranged the gamut and were freely and prolifically expressed.
Mr. Putin, arguing that a firm hand was needed to restore order, moved to methodically consolidate power, establishing what his advisers called “managed democracy.” He took over not just the Kremlin press pool but also used lawsuits to seize control of the one major independent television network. He ousted Western-oriented parties from Parliament and eliminated the election of governors so he could appoint them himself.
Perhaps most important, Mr. Putin laid down the law with the once-powerful oligarchs who had become so dominant during the 1990s, promising to let them keep their often ill-gotten fortunes and companies as long as they did not challenge him. Those who disregarded that diktat were arrested or driven out of the country and their businesses taken over. “I control everybody myself,” Mr. Putin said when asked early on what he liked about his new post.
By the time we left in late 2004, Moscow had been transformed. People who had happily talked with us at the start were now afraid to return our calls. “Now I have this fear all the time,” one told us at the time.
There is a similar chill now in Washington. Every day someone who used to feel free to speak publicly against Mr. Trump says they will no longer let journalists quote them by name for fear of repercussions, both Democrats and Republicans.
They worry about an F.B.I. headed by an avowed partisan warrior who has already developed what seems to be an enemies list. They fear that their outspokenness may hurt family members who work for the government. They are gambling that if they lie low maybe they will be forgotten.
After all, this is an administration that stripped security details and clearances from former officials who had angered the president and fired people who were associated with investigations into Mr. Trump or his allies.
The chief federal prosecutor for Washington has sent letters to a couple of Democratic members of Congress questioning them about public comments that he considers incitement to violence. At the same time, his office is being purged of lawyers who prosecuted Trump supporters who actually committed violence on Jan. 6, 2021.
In Russia, it eventually took a far darker path. Ms. Tregubova went on to write a tell-all book that angered the Kremlin. One day, a bomb exploded outside her apartment; she later fled the country. In the years since, independent journalists have been fired, arrested, poisoned or even killed. So have others deemed to be enemies of the people, most famously the opposition leaders Boris Y. Nemtsov, who was gunned down in the shadow of the Kremlin, and Aleksei A. Navalny, who died in prison.
Again, America is no Russia. The history there is so fraught and complicated. Certainly, many Russian journalists would still rather live in Washington these days than Moscow, confident that America’s tradition of free press and democratic ideals remains far stronger than what exists back home.
But in decades of reporting in Washington, under Republicans and Democrats, it has never felt quite like this.
