Eugene Daniels didn’t plan on being the face of the White House press corps in the dawn of a new administration hostile to the news media.
But because of a clause in the bylaws of the White House Correspondents’ Association, an 800-strong group of journalists who report on the president, he was next in line after Kaitlan Collins, the CNN star who was elected 2024-25 president of the association, had to step aside because of a move to New York.
Mr. Daniels, 36, a co-author of Politico’s Playbook newsletter, has now emerged as a key figure in an escalating fight between the Trump White House and the news media over press access and freedom. And he’s balancing his role at the association, which is unpaid volunteer work, with his career, moving this month to a new on-air job at MSNBC.
“We’re all competitors, fierce competitors, and the White House beat is tough, but at the same time, when it’s time to stand together, folks actually do that,” Mr. Daniels said of the correspondents’ association in an interview. “It’s unfortunate that this is where we are.”
The Trump administration has made no secret of its contempt for reporters, but its actions in recent weeks have shocked many news outlets.
President Trump first directed his communications team to bar The Associated Press from the press pool, a rotating group of reporters that travels with the president, and from spaces like the Oval Office and Air Force One. That was in retaliation for The A.P.’s continued use of “Gulf of Mexico” after Mr. Trump’s executive order to change the geographical name to Gulf of America. (Dozens of media outlets, including CNN, The New York Times and Fox News, protested the decision, and The A.P. has filed a First Amendment lawsuit.)
On Feb. 25, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, announced that the administration would start deciding which reporters could participate in the press pool and cover the president up close, a role that the White House Correspondents’ Association had held for decades.
The move generated a fresh wave of backlash. The Fox News senior White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich said on X: “This move does not give the 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 at the independence of a free press in the United States.” He told members in an email that the White House Correspondents’ Association “will not assist any attempt by this administration or any other in taking over independent press coverage of the White House.”
“Every administration up until now, including the Trump administration in term one, has understood that the people who are doing the covering should be making those decisions, not the people being covered,” Mr. Daniels said in an interview.
Mr. Daniels began his career in local television in Colorado Springs and joined Politico in 2018 as a video reporter. He rose through the ranks to become a White House correspondent, covering the Biden administration with a focus on the vice president, Kamala Harris. He has co-written the influential Playbook newsletter for the past four years.
This month, he will move to MSNBC as the first correspondent hired since the November announcement that the cable channel will soon be spun out into a new publicly traded company by Comcast, its parent company. Comcast is separating most of its cable networks, including MSNBC, CNBC and USA Network, from its film studio and theme parks.
Comcast will also keep the NBC broadcast network, which means MSNBC will no longer have access to NBC News’s news-gathering operation. MSNBC’s newly named president, Rebecca Kutler, is looking to build up the cable channel’s reporting muscle amid a broader shake-up of its lineup, including creating a Washington bureau and hiring domestic and international correspondents.
Mr. Daniels, who has been a contributing political analyst to MSNBC since 2021, will become a senior Washington correspondent and co-host of “The Weekend,” a panel show on Saturday and Sunday mornings, alongside Jonathan Capehart and other anchors who have yet to be named. His new roles were announced on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday.
While he is moving to a more liberal-leaning outlet, it “doesn’t really matter who is in the Oval Office for me,” Mr. Daniels said. “My job is to find out information.”
As part of the MSNBC lineup 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.” The MSNBC commentator Ayman Mohyeldin is expected to host an evening edition of “The Weekend.”
Mr. Daniels, who came out as gay at 27 and has posted about his personal life on social media, has increasingly become the subject of slurs and criticism online as his profile has grown. He said he had deleted the X social platform from his phone as “self care” so he could focus on his work. “For me, that is separate and apart from the work that I do, and other people feel differently, and that’s fine,” he said.
For now, he’s focused on the fight with the White House over access to covering the president, as well as coordinating the response among the White House Correspondents’ Association members. It is made up of journalists from a wide range of news outlets, including CNN, The Times and Fox News.
While Mr. Daniels wouldn’t comment on internal discussions at the association about how best to move forward, he said that the broad stance among his members was that the people who covered the White House should be coordinating the logistics of the coverage “without having to worry about what they wrote that day and if it’s going to be a problem for them.”
“We’re working through making sure that the American people can trust that the pool reports and information that’s getting out is unvarnished, that it doesn’t come only from the government,” Mr. Daniels said.
Mr. Daniels told members of the association last week that this year’s annual White House Correspondents’ dinner would go ahead as planned. Mr. Trump boycotted the dinners throughout his first term. Whether he will attend this year remains to be seen.
