Thirteen days. In the past three months, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has given on-camera White House press briefings on only 13 days. That's a grand new level of pathetic.
Five briefings were held in June, three in July and five in August. The average length was 23 minutes.
Those briefings have now all but dried up completely: Before today’s briefing, it had been 19 days since Sanders last held one, the longest gap of Trump's entire presidency.
As press briefings quickly degraded into blatant lies and ever-more-absurd levels of robotic evasion, during the past year, some urged the press to simply stop showing up. There's no point in having briefings if Sanders is going to refuse to answer substantive questions or, worse, is going to use the opportunity to spread misinformation rather than clarification. Trump allies, in the meantime, sniffed that the White House should nix the briefings because the "fake news" was being mean to them and didn't deserve them. Surely, many thought, there would eventually be a showdown.
What actually happened, instead, is that Sanders just stopped showing up during news cycles that were particularly bad for the White House. And there have been a lot of those.
The last three months have seen a guilty plea by longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen, the conviction of ex-Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, the indictment of a dozen Russian agents, a concrete claim that Trump himself was involved in criminal acts during the campaign, and take-your-pick. The Sarah Huckabee Sanders response during the worst of these news days has been to avoid the cameras for a few days, or more than a few days, in an apparent acknowledgement that there's no spin she could give that wouldn't make things worse.
The most notable of these was in June, when Sanders apparently refused outright to give press briefings on Trump's child detention policy. As the nation recoiled in disgust at the notion of child detention camps, the White House press room remained silent until, eventually, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was flown to Washington to head the briefing herself.
The result was disastrous—but mostly for Nielsen, not Sanders, who may have taken it as solid evidence in favor of the theory that hiding from the cameras during bad news cycles might indeed be her best path forward.
As the Russia investigation rolls on and ex-Trump allies continue to be charged, and/or convicted, and/or turned into prosecution assets, it seems evident that the crisis in the White House is only going to escalate from here. Trump now faces credible charges of unfitness, from both the myriad sources of a new tell-all book and from an anonymous antihero telling tales in the New York Times. Investigations into the Trump Foundation and the actions of his immediate family continue, and have uncovered credible evidence of widespread criminal acts. There will be no rest in the White House press room—and that's before the revelation of whatever new ultra-controversial policy Trump and his most aggressive advisers have planned next.
Is this how White House press briefings finally die? Not because the White House quits doing them in a huff, or the press begins boycotting them in a huff, but because as White House news cycles get worse Sarah Huckabee Sanders simply stops showing up on any day when she can't muster up the necessary credible or non-credible excuses for the shouty man upstairs? Maybe. It certainly seems a lot more likely than any notion that Sanders might quit due to a sudden discovery of principles.
UPDATE: In the first White House press conference in 20 days, Sanders reiterated that the anonymous op-ed accusing Trump of dangerous instability and the Woodward look into the Trump presidency are both bad and false and wrong; she also defended the Trump demand that his Justice Department open an investigation into the anonymous op-ed even though neither she nor the White House has been able to identify any crime the author is expected of committing.
Sanders also deflected a question about Trump's recent tweet attacking the Justice Department for indictments against two of his closest congressional allies, Reps. Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter, by asserting that she could not comment on an ongoing investigation. Commenting on an ongoing investigation is, of course, precisely what Trump did and what she was being asked about.
Whether this is measurably more information than was conveyed during the 19 days in which Sanders was absent from the podium altogether is, of course, a subject for debate.