Using Marine One as a backdrop, the White House has replaced formal briefings with impromptu chats where the president sets all the rules
The latest iteration of President Donald Trump’s signature news conferences in front of a thwapping Marine One on Wednesday was a whirligig of boastfulness, slingshot attacks and public self-therapy — in other words, vintage Trump.As reporters shouted dozens of questions above the din of the helicopter’s churning blades, Trump picked the ones he wanted — on Greenland, Russia, the Fed and background checks for gun sales — and brushed past those he didn’t.
By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. Grisham said last week that Trump is “so accessible” that she doesn’t “know what any of the press could complain about.” Veteran New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker suggested Trump benefits from the on-camera frenzy. “There’s no question that it works to his advantage that we look unruly and disorderly,” he said. “It’s not like standing at a podium in the East Room or the briefing room, where you can have a civilized calling on people who raise their hands.”
correspondent Mark Knoller, who keeps detailed records of the presidency. Knoller said he found only three occasions in which Obama stopped for such press availabilities in his eight-year tenure. And when Obama spoke to reporters in transit, he tended to use a podium, adding a dash of formality to the press scrum.
There is also more attention to details than the seemingly casual encounters suggest. If Trump is departing on Marine One in the late morning, “he always comes out of the Oval Office, even if he hasn’t been to the Oval Office, because it makes him look like he’s been working all day,” said a second White House reporter.
Even though Reagan took questions outside Marine One — amid speculation that he, too, benefited from the atmospherics of reporters shouting and looking unkempt — Kumar said Reagan would prepare at length with aides to respond to questions in formal settings, along with the administration providing daily briefings for reporters to go deeper into policy decisions.
it, instead of directly answering the question as it was phrased. Pacing from one end of the group to the other, Trump looks for familiar faces to call on and seizes on topics that he’s particularly energized about or aggravated by. “The retweet, which is what it was, just a retweet, was from somebody who is a very respected conservative pundit,” Trumpreporters in defending himself last week. Trump later said he had “no idea” whether the Clintons were involved in Epstein’s death, though used the gathering of reporters to offer a journalistic assignment.
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