So the bigger the hole the White House is in, the shorter the briefings get. Wednesday's Q&A portion with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders lasted all of about 16 minutes, almost exactly the same as Thursday's.
Perhaps the most newsy piece of information from the session was Sanders siding by default with communications director Anthony Scaramucci over chief of staff Reince Priebus in the Cain and Abel clash of the White House "brothers." TPM writes:
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday would not say whether President Donald Trump has confidence in White House chief of staff Reince Priebus.
“Look, I think I’ve addressed this question when it comes to staffing and personnel many times, that if the President doesn’t, then he’ll make that decision,” Sanders said during an on-camera White House press briefing.
Sanders characterized White House staffers as having "a lot of different perspectives" and bragged that they weren't burdened by "group think"—or what some people might otherwise think of as discipline or singleness of purpose.
If there was an overarching theme to this short look behind the curtain of Trump's great Oz, it was a deep desire by reporters to learn whether the pr*sident is "aware" of certain things that, frankly, shouldn't even be in question.
On Trump's shoot-from-the-hip announcement on the transgender military ban which has now been flatly rejected by military leadership:
"Was the president aware that he can't make policy changes via statements on Twitter?"
On Trump's “management style”:
Is the president aware that occasionally days like yesterday when he had a big jobs announcement that he wanted to roll out that his seemingly impulsive decisions to make an announcement on transgender troops steps on his own message?
On some Freedom Caucus members threatening to tank the Senate’s so-called "skinny repeal" if it passes:
Is the president aware of this?
Objectively, only the last of those queries about Trump's basic level of consciousness as a being that's supposedly "running" our country should ever have been in question.
In response, Sanders managed to drag the briefing to ever-sinking depths.
I think the president is aware that he can walk and chew gum at the same time. This is a White House that takes on a lot of different things every day, not just one, and we're going to continue to do that moving forward.