If you've been wondering whatever happened to Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, you're not alone. The White House has all but abandoned daily press briefings, with only 13 briefings total from June through August. Now the White House Correspondents' Association is politely asking the White House if Sarah will be returning to do her day job anytime soon or whether their members should maybe just start putting on puppet shows in her stead.
“We have repeatedly expressed our concerns to Sarah about the infrequency and short duration of the briefings,” Olivier Knox, WHCA president, told the Erik Wemple Blog. “In essentially every meeting we’ve had in the past couple of months, I’ve raised this,” says Knox, who notes that he has pushed the matter himself and with the WHCA board.
We can infer from the White House's unwillingness to continue on-the-record press briefings that Sanders and her team have simply run out of things to talk about. They have no message on the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, nothing in particular to say about the flooding in North and South Carolina, no hot take on ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's new cooperation deal with investigators probing Russian hacking. Nope, they're done.
It may be that the press briefings are no longer as soothing to the ever-tantruming Donald as they once were. It was widely reported that Trump himself watched the briefings, wanting to make sure his team properly spouted whatever message he had ordered them to spout, but it may be that recent news cycles (as in, every week since June) are so roundly unpleasant for the White House that there's no bluster Sanders can offer that won't result in him lashing out afterward.
Whatever the case, there are still no briefings. The last one was on Sept. 10. The next one may be tomorrow, or next month, or never. It appears the Donald Trump White House has run out of things they are willing to say on the record.