It's been nearly 100 days since Donald Trump appointed Stephanie Grisham to be the new White House press secretary, and during that time she has refused to hold a single press briefing. Ripping up decades of protocol and giving up on even the appearance of caring about transparency, the White House now most often communicates with journalists by allowing them to shout half-heard questions at Trump as he makes his way to the Marine One helicopter.
Gutting the White House press briefings is all part of a larger, historic, and incremental effort by the Trump administration to lock out the press—and, by extension, the public—from the government’s official duties and business. Now the implications are being felt as Trump is mired in an impeachment crisis. And for the White House, not hosting press briefings is a very good thing.
"Imagine if the WH had to answer questions at a briefing every day about Ukraine given how quickly new developments are happening," noted CNN political correspondent Abby Phillip. Imagine, indeed. In short, it would be a communications and messaging disaster for the White House. But for now, Trump's team gets to avoid that daily fiasco because the administration, in a stunning display of contempt for the free press and transparency, pulled the plug on press briefings.
If the Trump White House were waging a fact-based impeachment defense the way Bill Clinton’s White House did in the late 1990s, then not having press briefings would be bad, because that would rob Team Trump of a daily chance to set the impeachment narrative and pound on key facts. But of course, that’s not happening. Instead, the Trump defense is built on lies, debunked conspiracies, and, perhaps most oddly, public admissions of guilt. In this scenario, the last thing the White House wants is to face a series of detailed questions from seasoned (and skeptical) reporters.
Let's face it: The television clips from the daily press briefings these days would be brutal, as Trump's press secretary would be incapable of honestly addressing a mountain of questions about the quid pro quo the president tried to pull off in Ukraine to get a foreign power to interfere on his behalf in a U.S. election. Those stuttering responses, visuals of reporters catching the White House in lies, and lots of likely contentious back-and-forth with journalists would run on a cable news loop and reinforce the narrative that the White House is careening out of control. But with no press briefings, the White House gets to sidestep that debacle.
To be clear, Trump's messaging war on impeachment to date has been a failure, as he threatens to arrest Democrats for treason. The fact pattern continues to run counter to every hollow defense the White House has floated; public opinion is moving swiftly in favor of impeachment; and Republican leaders basically refuse to appear on television to discuss, let alone play defense on, the widening Ukraine scandal. So it's not as if having no press briefings has saved the White House. But their absence has helped the administration in important ways as it stumbles through this crisis.
Without the daily Q&A with reporters, it's Trump who controls the GOP messaging. He does it during so-called sprays inside the White House, and while standing near a whirring helicopter. In those settings, journalists are not given a chance to truly press Trump or ask detailed follow-up questions. Those settings of controlled chaos, where reporters yell simplistic questions, allows Trump to pick and choose reporters at random, and to simply ignore questions he doesn't like. Reporters are reduced to shouting out topic suggestions and then forced to listen to Trump's rambling, incoherent responses. (The sessions "are terrible for reporters," one White House reporter recently conceded to Politico. "It is a fucking circus.") Yes, cable news channels are now fact-checking Trump's televised monologues in real time, but it's often a losing battle because the misinformation comes at such a rapid pace.
"The White House has figured out that chaos is the president’s friend along with misinformation, confusion, and allegations about this and that," Paul Light, a New York University professor of public service, told Politico this week. "As long as they keep the public uncertain about what happened and why it matters, they are advantaged,”
This is a key point that Vanity Fair made two years ago: “The Trump administration has discovered something equally effective: lying to reporters and publicly attacking critics are like tossing grenades into the media eco-system. The press is constantly scrambling to respond to a never-ending river of slime, and the system is gradually overwhelmed.”
That's why having public press briefings is even more necessary. Yet under this Republican administration, the press did nothing when former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders faded them from existence, and they did nothing when her successor, Stephanie Grisham, refused to even acknowledge the briefings. And news organizations did nothing when Grisham explained that Trump had canceled the press briefings because reporters were being too darn mean.
"They weren’t being good to his people. And he doesn’t like that. He’s very loyal to his people, and he put a stop to it,” she told Fox News last month, as if demurring to White House press secretaries was the job of Beltway journalists.
Unfortunately, the disappearing press briefings became inevitable when the major news organizations failed to stand up to the Trump White House, and instead meekly stood aside and watched the Q&A’s get gutted. Friendly reminder: When the Obama White House tweaked an access policy in a way news organizations didn’t like, they instantly staged a revolt by indignantly, and collectively, demanding a meeting with Democratic administration officials to fix the problem.
There were no emergency meetings called by news organizations when it became obvious the Trump White House press briefings were being extinguished. And today, as impeachment engulfs the president, Republicans are very happy the briefings no longer exist.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.