The G20 Belongs to Doral Now — And the Press Is Not Invited
A finance summit closed to America’s leading newspapers. A December leaders’ meeting staged at the president’s private resort. An invitation to Vladimir Putin. A boycotted African host. What is happening around the G20 is not a diplomatic quirk — it is a system of self-dealing, censorship, and alliance-shredding that raises constitutional questions this country can no longer afford to defer.
When U.S. Treasury officials denied press credentials this weekend to individual reporters from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg News — barring them from covering the Group of 20 finance ministers’ meeting in Asheville, North Carolina — the administration offered no explanation. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Associated Press only that the exclusion had “nothing to do with point of view.” That is precisely the sort of assurance a democracy is supposed to disbelieve.
Alan Rappeport, who has covered Treasury and G20 meetings for The Times since 2017, was denied. His colleague, Berlin bureau chief Jim Tankersley, was permitted. Bloomberg reported that “numerous” of its reporters — including journalists posted in Europe and Asia — had their accreditation rejected. The Wall Street Journal declined to comment. What links the excluded is not their beat or their nationality but the record of their employers in challenging this administration. The National Press Club condemned the decision, and The Times called it “a blatant attempt to evade public scrutiny.”
This is one story. It is also every story. Because in the same week that finance ministers gathered in Asheville with a diminished American press pool, the White House confirmed it will invite Russian President Vladimir Putin — a man under an outstanding International Criminal Court arrest warrant — to the full G20 leaders’ summit in December. The venue: Trump National Doral Miami. The host: the sitting President of the United States, acting simultaneously as the resort’s owner and beneficiary.
I. The Credential Purge
The exclusion of reporters from Asheville is not an isolated administrative decision. It is the latest entry in a two-year campaign to remake federal press access as a system of political reward and punishment. Earlier this year, the Defense Department declared its press office a “classified space” inaccessible to journalists, forcing most outlets to leave the Pentagon last fall after refusing to sign a loyalty-tinged access agreement. The Associated Press sued three senior White House officials after being repeatedly denied access to presidential events over its refusal to adopt the president’s preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico; a federal district court ruled that the administration had improperly retaliated against the outlet, and the case remains on appeal at the D.C. Circuit, as reported by the First Amendment Center. The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation have sued the administration over a scheme to sell early access to the president’s Truth Social posts for as much as $100,000 per month.
The pattern is not subtle. What is subtle is the way each escalation is dressed up as procedure. Denials issued without stated reason. Credential decisions made by unnamed officials. Standards that are transparent only in their inconsistency.
“Denying American journalists access to an event in the United States is not just another disturbing effort by the administration to undermine independent journalism, but a blatant attempt to evade public scrutiny.”
— The New York Times, statement on the Asheville exclusions
The finance-ministers meeting is not a decorative gathering. Its published agenda includes sanctions policy, the ongoing war with Iran, global bond markets, and inflation — exactly the subjects on which the American public has the strongest claim to independent reporting. To narrow the pool of journalists in the room is to narrow what the public will ever be told about what was said in it.
II. The Putin Invitation and the President’s Resort
The December 14–15 leaders’ summit at Trump National Doral Miami was announced last year, over bipartisan objections that hosting foreign delegations at a property owned by the sitting president raised obvious Emoluments Clause concerns. In April, The Washington Post reported that the administration intended to invite Vladimir Putin. The State Department has since made the invitation official: “Russia is a G-20 member and will be invited to attend ministerial meetings and the leaders’ summit,” a senior administration official said, per the Post. Trump told reporters, “If he came, it would probably be very helpful.”
Putin has been largely shunned by the West since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. He remains the subject of an ICC arrest warrant issued in March 2023 over the forced deportation of Ukrainian children. A ceremonial welcome at a G20 hosted on U.S. soil — at the president’s own resort, no less — would mark the most significant international rehabilitation of the Russian leader in four years. It also occurs against the backdrop of the administration’s parallel decision to exclude South Africa from the 2026 summit, based on discredited claims of “white genocide” — a diplomatic exclusion of the previous G20 host that violates two decades of protocol, and which South African officials say has prompted other members to consider a boycott of their own.
The moral geometry is stark. Vladimir Putin is welcome. Cyril Ramaphosa is not.
The Venue
The December 14–15 summit will be held at Trump National Doral Miami, the president’s private resort. Foreign delegations paying the resort for lodging, catering, and services amount to direct payments to a business the president owns, an arrangement Trump was forced to abandon for the 2020 G7 after bipartisan outcry.
The Guest of Honor
Vladimir Putin has been formally invited despite an outstanding ICC arrest warrant for the deportation of Ukrainian children. Trump, per Post reporting, has said Russia is “welcome to attend all G-20 meetings.” Moscow has been noncommittal on whether Putin himself will travel.
The Excluded Host
Trump has barred South Africa — the 2025 G20 host — from attending the 2026 summit, citing baseless “white genocide” claims. South Africa’s foreign ministry told Fox News that other member states have signaled they will boycott if the exclusion holds.
The Excluded Press
Reporters from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg News were denied credentials to the Asheville finance meeting. Treasury refused to explain the criteria. The National Press Club condemned the denials.
III. How Our Allies Got Here
To understand why the December summit will convene in an atmosphere of quiet fury, one must return to January. On January 16, 2026, the president announced 10 percent tariffs — rising to 25 percent by June 1 — on eight NATO allies: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland. Their offense was participating in joint Arctic military exercises in Greenland and declining to support his stated intention to acquire the territory. As the Baker Institute documented, the European Union prepared to retaliate with €93 billion in counter-tariffs and to deploy, for the first time, its “anti-coercion instrument” against a member of NATO.
Trump backed down within days after markets fell and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte negotiated a face-saving “framework” at Davos. But the damage was permanent. Congressman Brendan Boyle, the lead House Democrat to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, put it plainly: “He is succeeding in uniting the world, only against us.” Rep. Linda Sánchez, of the House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee, added: “President Trump is playing into Russia and China’s hands. They want nothing more than to see NATO and our Western alliances crack.”
IV. The Bill Comes to Your Kitchen Table
What does any of this cost the average American? A great deal, and specifically. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation calculated that the 2025 tariff regime amounted to a tax increase of roughly $1,000 per U.S. household, projected to rise to $1,300 per household in 2026. Federal Reserve researchers at the Dallas Fed found that core inflation hit 3.2 percent in March — the highest reading since 2023 — a surge the Fed attributed largely to the “full pass-through” of tariff costs to consumers. Absent the tariffs, core inflation would have been closer to 2.3 percent. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has publicly said the tariffs are responsible for the entirety of inflation’s rise above the central bank’s 2 percent target.
The Center for American Progress documented that electricity prices in 2025 rose two-and-a-half times faster than the general inflation rate — the highest annual increase since 2014 — while wholesale natural gas prices climbed 56 percent. The tariff burden, measured as a share of household income, falls hardest on the working poor. This is what “America First” purchases: higher grocery bills, higher utility bills, and a diplomatic corps that spends its energy defending the president’s personal grievances rather than pursuing the country’s interests.
What the United States might realistically obtain from a G20 hosted under these conditions is unclear. Our closest trading partners have already begun to reroute. The EU signed a long-delayed free-trade agreement with the Mercosur bloc — Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay — the same week that the NATO tariffs were announced. Europe is now openly discussing “strategic autonomy,” a phrase that once described a fringe French preoccupation and now describes actual Brussels policy.
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V. The Democratic Response and the Courts
Congressional Democrats have moved, if unevenly, from rhetorical objection to institutional action. In April, House Judiciary Ranking Member Jamie Raskin of Maryland introduced a 10-page bill to establish a 17-member commission authorized by Section 4 of the 25th Amendment — the constitutional clause that permits Congress to designate “such other body” to assess presidential fitness. The measure has dozens of Democratic co-sponsors. It has, predictably, no Republican support and no realistic path in a chamber Republicans control. But its introduction places on the record — permanently — the constitutional predicate.
The courts have proven more productive. In April, U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles dismissed the president’s $10 billion defamation suit against The Wall Street Journal over its Epstein reporting, ruling that the complaint “fails to adequately allege actual malice.” The A.P.’s First Amendment case over the Gulf of Mexico naming dispute produced an initial ruling in the outlet’s favor. As Columbia Journalism Review has documented, a string of court decisions have gone against the administration’s attempts to shut down critical reporting. The Supreme Court in February struck down the IEEPA tariffs, forcing the government to begin returning tens of billions of dollars in illegally collected duties — though the administration is already replacing the revoked levies with other statutory authorities. The lawfare is exhausting, expensive, and — mercifully — often unsuccessful. But it is not a substitute for political accountability.
The 25th Amendment: Not a Fantasy, Not a Solution, But a Standard
How it works. Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, permits the vice president together with a majority of the Cabinet — or, alternatively, “such other body as Congress may by law provide” — to declare that the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Upon such a declaration, the vice president becomes acting president. If the president contests the finding, a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress is required to sustain removal.
Who has called for it. More than 85 congressional Democrats — including Sens. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and Andy Kim of New Jersey, and Reps. Ro Khanna of California, Mike Quigley of Illinois, Sydney Kamlager-Dove of California, Eric Swalwell of California, and Yassamin Ansari of Arizona — have publicly demanded that the Cabinet invoke Section 4. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland has now put the mechanism into legislative text, briefing the full Democratic caucus on the amendment’s workings in April.
The constitutional argument. “Inability” in Section 4 has never been formally defined by the Supreme Court. But the framers of the amendment — testifying in 1965 congressional hearings — repeatedly explained that it was intended to cover any circumstance in which a president could not, or would not, discharge the duties of office in a manner consistent with his constitutional obligations. Threatening to eradicate a foreign civilization on social media; conditioning national security on personal grievance about the Nobel Peace Prize; monetizing presidential communications through a family-owned platform; hosting foreign heads of state at a personally owned resort; excluding domestic press from public events based on political criteria — each, standing alone, would once have been considered a scandal sufficient to end a presidency. Together, they describe a pattern that Section 4 was designed to address.
The practical barriers. The barriers are severe and honest people should say so. The vice president and Cabinet were selected by this president; they will not act. The 25th Amendment cannot be used to remove a president merely because his policies are unwise, cruel, or unpopular. Republican control of Congress renders a two-thirds override arithmetically impossible. Rep. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has publicly acknowledged the futility. These are not small obstacles. They are the reason the amendment has never been invoked to involuntarily remove a president.
Why the barriers do not close the case. The purpose of establishing a constitutional record — hearings, findings, legislative text, floor speeches — is not always immediate removal. It is the creation of an authoritative account, delivered by a coordinate branch of government, of what this presidency has done. That record matters for the midterm elections. It matters for future prosecutions. It matters for the historical judgment that will eventually be rendered on every member of the Cabinet and every senator who declined to act. To fail to build the record because removal is unlikely is to concede that constitutional accountability is a function of political convenience. It is not. The oath binds regardless of the whip count.
Editorial Conclusion
A G20 summit closed to the American press, staged at the president’s private resort, with Vladimir Putin as a featured guest and South Africa formally banned, is not a foreign-policy story. It is a story about whether the United States remains a constitutional republic in which the presidency is a public trust rather than a private business.
The evidence is on the record. The reporters have been named. The tariffs have been collected. The lawmakers have spoken. The courts have begun to rule. What remains is the question of whether the institutions built to check a presidency of this character will act while the option remains — or whether they will explain, later and at length, why they did not.
The verdict of this Editorial Board is that the record must be built now, in daylight, by every constitutional means available. The 25th Amendment. Impeachment inquiry. Court supervision of press access. Congressional subpoena power over the Doral arrangements. A restoration of the appropriations power over an administration that treats foreign policy as a personal ledger. The republic does not defend itself. Someone has to.
Sources & References
- PBS News — Treasury Department blocks certain journalists from covering G20 meeting
- Editor & Publisher — National Press Club condemns G20 press exclusions
- Washington Post — Trump intends to invite Putin to G-20 summit in Miami, officials say
- France 24 / AFP — US invites Putin to G20 summit but Trump doubts he’ll come
- Wikipedia — 2026 G20 Miami Summit — Trump National Doral Miami venue
- AllAfrica — Trump says South Africa will not be invited to 2026 G20 in Miami
- Al Jazeera — Can Trump ban South Africa from 2026 G20 summit, as he says he will?
- Fox News — Trump blocks South Africa from 2026 G20; other members threaten boycott
- Baker Institute — US Policy Shifts and the Future of the Transatlantic Alliance
- Time — The Five Ways Europe Could Respond to Trump’s Greenland Threat
- Rep. Brendan Boyle — Statement on Trump tariffs targeting NATO allies
- Rep. Linda Sánchez — Trump’s tariffs on NATO play into Russia, China’s hands
- Axios — House Democrats file long-shot 25th Amendment bill targeting Trump
- NBC News — Dozens of Democrats call for Trump’s removal after Iran threats
- PBS News — Could the 25th Amendment be invoked against Trump? Here’s how it works
- Rep. Mike Quigley — Quigley calls for Trump’s removal under the 25th Amendment
- Tax Foundation — Trump Tariffs Tracker: Rates, Revenue, and Impact
- Fortune — Fed researchers see ‘full pass-through’ of Trump’s tariff costs to consumers
- Center for American Progress — A Year in Review: Trump Administration’s Economic Policies
- Columbia Journalism Review — Lawfare: Court decisions against Trump’s press suppression
- First Amendment Center — AP and Trump administration argue press-access case before federal appeals court
- NPR — South Africa G20 US boycott — Ramaphosa: “Their absence is their loss”
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