Former White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart said "a psychiatrist" is missing from the public conversation about President Donald Trump after CNN aired a compilation of the president's repeated insults directed at women reporters.

The exchange came during a panel discussion led by CNN anchor Erin Burnett about Trump's recent ban of CNN, MS NOW and other possible media outlets. Burnett played a supercut of the president's name-calling and verbal abuse toward women around him at press gaggles, telling viewers it was "only a small sample." The segment wove together two running storylines: the president's on-camera treatment of individual reporters and his move to bar several news organizations from covering him.

Among the clips:

• "What a stupid question for you to ask," Trump told an unidentified woman on July 27.
• "You're the most obnoxious reporter in the whole room," he told another woman on December 8, 2025.
• "You are the worst reporter," he told CNN's Kaitlan Collins on February 3.
• "Quiet! Quiet, piggy," he ordered another woman on Nov. 14, 2025.
• "I'm tired of it, you dumb person," he told a woman on May 12.
• "She's a horror show," he said of another female reporter on May 8, while speaking to aides.
• "You have a lot of hate in your heart," he accused a woman on Sept. 16, 2025.

"As I said, that's a small sampling," Burnett told her panel, adding that Trump "thrives on those exchanges."

Lockhart responded: "You know, what's missing from this conversation is a psychiatrist. Because it really is about his state of mind. I don't know that people fully understand, and just when you look at the interactions with the reporters, it's just no one has ever talked, as a president, like that. And I think it's interesting that in every clip that you showed, it was a woman that he was talking to. So, there's a lot going on in his pathology. And that has as much to do with any one of these acts, I think."

Lockhart spoke from the vantage of the job itself, a role that sits at the center of a White House's daily dealings with the press corps.

CNN media analyst Brian Stelter suggested Trump is caving under the weight of an incoming "blue wave at a time when his base might need something to get excited."

"He's trying to give the MAGA media audience something to be excited about, because nothing else seems to be working for the party," Stelter said, citing plummeting polls for the president and his party and a slump in popularity.

Whatever the motivation, Ryan Goodman, a professor at NYU School of Law, said the ban on CNN and other media organizations is unlikely to survive court scrutiny. He drew a parallel to the administration's attempts to penalize law firms.

"They try to restrict law firms on the basis of the president not liking what the law firms had done, and therefore restricting their contracts and their security clearances, which is equivalent to, in some sense, media coverage and media having clearances and accreditation," Goodman said. "He's lost five times. There have been five cases, and he's lost all of them on the First Amendment."

If the outlet ban reaches a comparable courtroom test, it would land on the same First Amendment ground where, Goodman's count, the administration has lost every case so far.

The relevant segment is available on YouTube.

Source: Alternet