Symone Sanders-Townsend spent years on the other side of the podium, managing White House reporters as chief spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris. Coverage she considered unfair, she says, simply came with the territory.

“There were definitely times where I'm like, 'Oh, so and so is in the pool today. It's gonna be a little more difficult,'” the MS NOW host told Fortune. “But it never crossed my mind that I could say I don't want them here.”

President Donald Trump had no such hesitation. On Sept. 18, he announced he would ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, accusing the outlets of reporting “FICTION and LIES.” On Monday morning, the three organizations sued, and hours later Trump defended the ban at a press conference alongside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the outlets' access restored for 14 days, finding the ban was likely unconstitutional. The two-week window means the broader constitutional fight is far from settled. Yet mere hours after the ruling, MS NOW's Laura Barrón-López and two CNN journalists were turned away from the arrival ceremony for Chinese President Xi Jinping's state dinner.

“There is a difference between rights on paper and rights in practice,” Sanders-Townsend said, citing the constitutional amendments adopted after the Civil War to protect Black Americans. “We cannot allow that right to become a right on paper and not a right in practice.”

“This is a White House and this is an administration where retribution is actually a feature, not a bug,” she said. “The president literally ran on 'I will be your retribution.'”

For Sanders-Townsend, the deepest concern is the midterm elections. “It's not lost on me that it's happening less than 40 days before Election Day,” she said. Most voters, she noted, learn results from news outlets rather than county election websites. “If this president can convince a large swath of Americans that the news organizations cannot independently be trusted to tell them the truth, well, then he can claim that these organizations calling the election are actually lies.”

Covering the White House is a small niche within an already small field of journalism. Reporters know one another, share notes, remember each other's kids' birthdays. So when the White House blocked CNN from its turn in the rotating TV pool — the small rotation of reporters and camera crews who cover events on behalf of the entire press corps — the banned outlets did not stand alone: ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC refused to fill in, declaring in a rare joint statement that “no administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

Nearly 50 news organizations signed a friend-of-the-court brief, compiled by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit press-freedom group, urging that the ban be lifted. In the meantime, the New York Times and the Washington Post said they would hold off on running pool photos. Fox News stood with CNN in 2018 as well, after the White House barred CNN's Kaitlan Collins from an event. That earlier clash also reached the courts: when the administration suspended CNN correspondent Jim Acosta's press pass, a federal judge ordered it restored while CNN's lawsuit proceeded.

Sanders-Townsend praised the rival outlets for backing the three banned networks. “For the entities and individuals that have fought when their rights have been trampled on, by and large they've won,” she said. “It's the organizations that just decide to roll over and settle that are the cautionary tales.”

She also pointed to the president's enduring affinity for the media. At Monday's joint press conference with Mayor Mamdani, Trump described the relationship as a two-way street, noting the media would never “boycott” him. “In one breath, he will lambaste the media and literally drag the media apparatus through the mud,” Sanders-Townsend said. “But in another breath, he cares very much so about the coverage. He watches MS NOW. The people at the White House watch our network.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The ban lands as MS NOW, the network formerly known as MSNBC, builds a business of its own. The network split from NBC News last year, when Comcast spun off its cable channels into Versant. On Sept. 9, it launched a paid membership app. The president said the spin-off was meant to protect against a dying business, but the company says it has logged 150 million podcast downloads alone this year.

'I don't live by the comments'

One of those podcasts is Clock It, which Sanders-Townsend co-hosts with former White House correspondent Eugene Daniels. On Sept. 16, streamer Hasan Piker made his first MS NOW appearance on the show, and the exchange that followed went viral. “If I was a strategist or a consultant or the political director on one of these campaigns, I would absolutely be telling my people to disavow you,” she told him on the podcast. In response, Piker argued that his views are closer to the majority's than the national Democratic Party's.

Piker, who has 3.1 million Twitch followers, has campaigned with Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed called Piker's past remark that the U.S. deserved the 9/11 attacks “a dumb statement,” but has continued appearing alongside him.

Sanders-Townsend told Fortune that she and Daniels booked Piker to talk to him rather than about him. She agreed with his view that Republicans use him to dodge the issues he raises. “They just want to talk about him, and I think he's correct about that,” she said.

Still, she argued, candidates must think carefully about messaging when the platform belongs to a high-profile streamer. “It's one thing when you are going to someone on their platform because you want the access and the audience that they have done the work of building up,” she said. “But when the creators or the streamers step out of their element and then they step onto a stage next to a candidate, I do think that the stakes change.”

The interview drew criticism from both the right and the left, with many questioning why she invited him in the first place. “Did we read the comments? Yeah, but I don't live by the comments, so the comments aren't going to kill me,” she said.

She added that the online debate overlooks a key step in the policy process. “There's a lot of conversation about policies, but not enough conversation about the politics that takes to make the policies a reality.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.