If you have completely forgotten that Donald Trump long ago appointed a new White House press secretary to replace the unlamented Sarah Huckabee Sanders, you are forgiven. Current press secretary Stephanie Grisham has been as quiet as a church mouse since her June promotion; for a time it was not entirely clear whether Grisham was a real person or merely another of Trump's fictional, promotional personalities.
But Grisham appeared on the stupidest Fox News show on Monday morning, either chatting with the Fox & Friends hosts because Donald himself wanted the play date or, just as likely, to create a proof-of-life video. Her main contribution was to confirm that on-camera White House press briefings aren't likely to return anytime soon.
"[T]o be honest, the briefings have become a lot of theater. And I think that a lot of reporters were doing it to get famous. I mean, yeah, they’re writing books now. I mean, they’re all getting famous off of this presidency."
Using the presidency as vehicle for grifting self-promotion? What an appalling thought.
Grisham has not merely sought to emulate prior press secretary Sanders' invisibility, however. She has been equally adept at the lying-outright parts of the job. Her claims about just how and why Trump suspended press briefings have the usual Dear Leader gloss: Grisham claims it was because the press was not "being good to his people," and, because "he's very loyal to his people," he "put a stop to it."
Trump has in reality been infamous for not being loyal to his people, churning through staff with such frequency that it has been one of the era's long-running jokes. The man's insults of once-lauded but now-departed staffers are equally well known.
There were ample rumors, back when daily White House briefings were beginning to dwindle, that it was because administration staff were getting more and more reluctant to appear on camera, dreading being summoned by the always-television-watching president for a dressing-down on how he would have handled the moment. And the daily briefings finally dwindled down to nothing not long after a particularly egregious bit in which Sanders and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen defended the administration's family separation policies, a performance so egregious that it immediately turned Nielsen into a public pariah.
In any event, the White House has no plans to answer public questions in the immediate future. Trump will still pick and choose which shouted questions he will pretend to hear while helicopter rotors spin behind him, and Grisham and the others will still be available to explain Dear Leader's ever-increasing greatness to reporters on a case-by-case basis, albeit most often anonymously; but the White House has decided that responding to questions makes it, officially, too sad to continue. And so the nation will not be getting those answers.