He is the face of a press corps in the white house that is under attack by Trump

Eugene Daniels did not plan to be the face of the White House Press Corps in the dawn of a new administration that was hostile to the news media.

But due to a clause in the statutes of the White House Correspondents’ Association, an 800-strong group of journalists reporting the president, he was the next in line after Kaitlan Collins, the CNN star, elected to 2024-25 president of the association, had to go aside because of a transition to New York.

Mr. Daniels, 36, a co-author of Politico’s PlayBook newsletter, has now emerged as a key figure in an escalating match between Trump The White House and the news media about press access and freedom. And he balances his role in the association, which is unpaid volunteering, with his career moving this month to a new on-air job at MSNBC.

“We are all competitors, tough competitors, and the White House is tough, but at the same time when it’s time to stand together, people actually do,” Mr. Daniels about the correspondents’ association in an interview. “It’s unfortunate that this is where we are.”

The Trump administration has made no secret to its disdain for journalists, but its actions in recent weeks have shocked many news sites.

President Trump first instructed his communication team to prevent the Associated Press from the press pool, a rotating group of journalists traveling with the president, and from space such as the Oval Office and Air Force. It was in return for the AP’s continued use of the “Mexico Golf” after Mr. Trump’s executive order to change the geographical name to America Gulf. (Dozens of media including CNN, The New York Times and Fox News, protested the decision, and AP has brought a trial for the first change.)

On February 25, the White House announced press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, that the administration would start deciding which journalists could participate in the press pool and cover the president close to, a role that the White House correspondents’ association had held for decades.

The move generated a fresh wave of setbacks. Fox News Senior White House Correspondent Jacqui Heinrich said On X: “This step does not give power back to the people – it gives power to the White House.”

Mr. Daniels said in a statement at the time that the move “tears by the independence of a free press in the United States.” He told the members of an E email that correspondents from the White House “will not help any attempt from this administration or anyone else to take over independent press coverage of the White House.”

“Each administration so far, including the Trump administration in the long term, has understood that the people who carry out the coverage must make these decisions, not the people being covered,” Mr. Daniels in an interview.

Mr. Daniels began his career in local television in Colorado Springs and joined Politico in 2018 as a video. He got up through the ranks to become a correspondent in the White House and covers the Biden administration focusing on Vice President, Kamala Harris. He has co-written The influential Playbook letter in the last four years.

This month he is moving to MSNBC when the first correspondent to was hired since the November message that the cable channel will soon be spun out in a new listed company of Comcast, its parent company. Comcast separates most of its cable networks, including MSNBC, CNBC and USA Network, from its film studio and amusement parks.

Comcast will also retain NBC Broadcast Network, which means MSNBC no longer has access to NBC News’s news collection operation. MSNBC’s newly named president, Rebecca Kutler, is looking to build the cable channel’s reporting muscle in the midst of a wider shaker of his set-up, including creating a Washington agency and hiring domestic and international correspondents.

Mr. Daniels, who has been a contributing political analyst to MSNBC since 2021, becomes a senior Washington correspondent and co-host for “The Weekend”, a panel show on Saturday and Sunday morning with Jonathan Capehart and other anchors that are not yet named. His new roles were announced on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday.

While moving to a more liberal-reliable marketing market, it doesn’t really mean who’s in the oval office for me, “said Mr. Daniels.” My job is to find out information. “

As part of the MSNBC setup changes, Joy Reid’s Evening News Show, “The Reidout,” was canceled. Her show will be replaced with a program led by Symone Sanders Townsend, Michael Steele and Alicia Menendez, the current hosts of “The weekend.” MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin is expected to rope an evening edition of “The weekend.”

Mr. Daniels, who came out as gay at. 27 and has sent about his personal life on social media, has increasingly become the subject of slurry and criticism online as his profile has grown. He said he had deleted x social platform from his phone as “self -care” so he could focus on his work. “For me, it’s separately and apart from the work I do and other people feel different, and that’s fine,” he said.

For the time being, he is focused on the fight with the White House on access to cover the president as well as coordination of the answer among the White House correspondents’ association members. It consists of journalists from a wide range of news sites, including CNN, The Times and Fox News.

While Mr. Daniels would not comment on internal discussions in the association about how to move forward, he said that the broad attitude of his members was that the people who covered the White House should coordinate the logistics of the coverage “without having to worry about what they wrote that day and if it will be a problem for them.”

“We work through to ensure that the American people can trust that the pool’s reports and information coming out is not -expatriate that it is not just from the government,” Mr. Daniels.

Mr. Daniels told members of the association last week that this year’s annual White House correspondents would move on as planned. Trump Boikoted dinners throughout its first period. Whether he is attending this year is to see.