Zolan Kanno-Youngs on covering Trump’s second term: 'You’ve gotta be ready'

Zolan Kanno-Youngs still remembers the first time his reporting got called fake news by President Donald Trump.

“We’d been working on [an investigative immigration story] for a while; it was intense,” Kanno-Youngs said. “I was proud of the reporting and thought it was gonna be impactful. Then somebody texted me Trump's tweet, and in the tweet he specifically called out some reporting I did not by name, but called out reporting I did.” 

He added: “I reached out to my editor like, ‘Hey, I don't know what the president’s referring to here, but I looked through my notes and we're solid.’ And my editor said something like, ‘I didn't have a doubt, but good for you for going through your notes.’ Having that kind of support makes you a bit more confident when you're under fire.”

For the 2015 Sports Journalism Institute alum now working as a White House correspondent for the New York Times, it’s part of the reality of covering an administration that has created chaos with executive orders in its first few months.

“You have to see it as you were put in this position for a reason, the spotlight is on you now,” Kanno-Youngs said. “People are reading our coverage. There’s a lot of people relying on us.”

He added, “Every day is hectic down here; there's always some breaking news. I've never seen this pace of news that we're currently seeing.”

Since taking office for his second presidential term in January, Trump has signed 165 executive orders, the highest first-year total of any president since 1933 and just 15 less than the total signed by President Joe Biden during his four years in office.

Kanno-Youngs, 31, referred to the flood of executive orders and overall news as more intense than any situation he’d experienced, especially compared to the Biden administration, which he also covered after being named a White House correspondent in 2021. 

He also noted Trump’s willingness to put his MAGA stamp on everything from private law firms to the Kennedy Center, as loyalists throughout the government have allowed for less oversight during his second term.

One area of concern for White House beat reporters is the Trump administration’s seizing control over the White House press pool. This has allowed the administration to select which journalists have access to covering the president, a move that the White House Correspondents' Association said "tears at the independence of a free press."

Simply put, covering a Trump presidency is “very different” than covering Biden’s, Kanno-Youngs said. 

“We hear from Trump all the time, there's been so many days where he's had executive order signings that suddenly turned into gaggles,” Kanno-Youngs said before elaborating that a major difference was Biden’s much less public persona. 

“Biden, we didn't see as much of, we didn't hear from him as much … I think that White House tried to close himself off when it came to policies in like how people were making their decisions and you kind of had to dig and scrap,” Kanno-Youngs said.

Kanno-Youngs would reference a story by The Times from 2023 that highlighted Biden as having the fewest news conferences of any president up to that point in his presidency since President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s.

Recently, discussion regarding Biden’s lack of public appearances has resurfaced following the release of a new book, “Original Sin,” which called into question the way his administration may have tried to mask alleged cognitive decline. 

Despite Trump’s more frequent media availability, Kanno-Youngs said that politicians talking more frequently still requires verifying the information being presented through other sources.

“Press relations in Washington are a little complicated,” Kanno-Youngs said. “It's not just how much a president will talk, but the accuracy of that information.”

Though the New York Times’ reporters remain in the White House press pool, Kanno-Youngs acknowledged that restrictions on press access can make life “very difficult.” He stressed the importance of having a broad source list outside the White House, regardless of how the press pool is being handled, because watchdog journalism requires that reporters not rely on the government to supply all of the news.

Some of Kanno-Youngs’ current confidence stems from working on the Department of Homeland Security beat for The Times from 2019-21. He was a young reporter covering a polarizing topic like immigration.

“If you're writing about a subject that’s polarizing, there’s very few stories where everyone's happy,” Kanno-Youngs said. “You know you're gonna get hate.”

Nevertheless, he takes his responsibility as a public informant providing “bulletproof” reporting more seriously than online scrutiny. He advocates that, regardless of the reactions to his stories, the most important thing for a beat reporter is remaining “relentlessly present.”

“I always wanted to be where I could hold an institution accountable,” Kanno-Youngs said. “Even if somebody gets mad at me after a story, I'm gonna show up the next day. …You want to tell [readers] what's going on and the motivations of people making decisions that will impact their lives; to tell the people what the government doesn't want them to know. Frankly, all of that is chaotic.”

Despite the chaotic nature of reporting on this second Trump administration, Kanno-Youngs said he believes covering news at the White House, even when the job is less enjoyable or celebrated, requires that you embrace the beat.

“We owe it to our readers,” Kanno-Youngs said. “You can't be complacent with this stuff, you've gotta be ready to cover new things coming down the pipeline.”

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