The White House press corps has fumed the air with incense and prayers, beseeching the gods of journalism to increase the number of Sarah Sanders’ appearances in the James S. Brady Briefing Room. Once as numerous as the stars in the heavens, White House briefings now drop about once a month. State Department reporters are begging the same. Once a daily occurrence in previous administrations, Foggy Bottom press briefings are now weekly in the age of President Donald Trump. And don’t forget Pentagon reporters when filling in the cells of your pity budget: As Paul Farhi recently reported in the Washington Post, informal press gaggles at the Pentagon, once twice a week, are down to once or twice a month.
White House press briefings have become not only rarer but shorter. A Sanders briefing typically lasts between 15 to 18 minutes. Press sessions run by Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs lasted about an hour, while the briefings by Bush’s flack, Ari Fleischer, ran about 25 minutes. Trump has methodically starved the press of the daily play-by-play of governance at the White House, the State Department, and Pentagon that has been the standard for a half-century. The State Department and Pentagon have reduced the number of reporters allowed to travel with the secretaries on overseas trips, Farhi notes, forcing some to book parallel itineraries if they hope to cover the story.
The greatest victim of the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW press freeze-out isn’t reporters, though. It’s Trump himself. There are lots of good reasons for a White House to hold regular press briefings, and almost none of them have to do with messaging.
Unencumbered by the consistency and coherence that regular briefings inspire, Trump has pursued whatever capricious policy of the day that pops into his head. Trump and his advisers can’t stay on the same page because there is no page. If you told Trump that spurning the press makes him unaccountable, he would probably count it as a plus. For Trump, constant improvisation, back-tracking, and starting anew without warning feed him the maximum flexibility he craves.
The paucity of official briefings by the top underlings in the Trump administration contrasts with the unending series of interviews Trump has given, especially to the Fox News Channel. Trump expends enormous energy on extended gab sessions with reporters during pool spray coverage of White House events. He willingly conducts quickie interviews as he boards Marine One. He chats up scrums of reporters wherever they skitter. We’ve never had a president this on-call to the press. Data collected by scholar Martha Joynt Kumar and published by the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple shows that no president has made himself more available to the news media over his first two years in office than Trump.
The two trends — avoidance and approach — aren’t really in conflict. The State Department and the Pentagon have become press-shy not because they hate reporters more than they once did — though that could always be a possibility—but because they fear the consequences of contradicting the mouth almighty that is Trump. Back in 2017, P.J. Crowley, a spokesman at State for the first Obama administration, linked the low profile being maintained by Trump State Department spokespeople to the president’s blabbermouthery.
“No one’s sure what the policy is,” Crowley told the New York Times. “If you don’t know what the policy is, you don’t want to be communicating it. You don’t want to get out ahead of the president of the United States.”
Policy uncertainty has been a hallmark of the Trump presidency, leading to regular clashes between Trump and his secretaries of state and defense, who frequently sang from different hymnals than their boss. When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters of talks with the North Koreans, Trump directly contradicted him, calling negotiations with “Little Rocket Man” a waste of time. Trump also publicly contradicted Tillerson on Qatar. Last year, the president contradicted both Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis after they called for the U.S. troops to stay in Syria. Trump said that presence would end “very soon.” Trump also contradicted Mattis’ plans for combat readiness by suspending war games in South Korea, and they worked at cross-purposes on the deployment of troops to the border, the Afghanistan pullout and Iran policy.
Policy clashes between a president and his Cabinet are normal. What’s abnormal is for them to be waged in public as they have been under Trump. In theory, the good thing about regular press briefings at the highest levels is that they help an administration maintain and develop coherent, intelligible, and defensible policies — policies that can be successfully communicated in conversations with foreign powers. Whether you agree with or oppose Trump, the United States would benefit from a president who conveyed policies with greater dependability. Instead, other nations must consult oracles and entrails to determine where the next outburst of caprice will transport our president.
Regular press briefings also benefit the chief executive because, believe it or not, reporters’ informed questions can serve as an early warning system for a president, alerting him to policy defects or a changing political landscape. By serving as his own press secretary and his own communications director, Trump has stifled not just the messaging consistency that governance requires, but he has also ended a crucial inflow of information into the White House. Our president’s greatest problem isn’t that he doesn’t know anything. It’s that he doesn’t want to know anything.
Morgan Ortagus is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s new spokesperson. The Washington Post reported that she “intends to restore the frequency of State Department briefings to several times a week.” We’ll believe it when we see it.
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Jack Shafer is POLITICO’s senior media writer.