WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s White House is putting the “brief” in press briefings.
Sean Spicer, the embattled press secretary, spoke for 30 minutes Tuesday and didn’t answer a number of basic questions, including whether the president believes Russia interfered in the 2016 election and whether Trump had seen the hotly debated Senate health care bill.
Once more freewheeling exchanges, White House press briefings have been shrinking both in length and content as Trump’s senior aides clamp down on information and contend with the president’s own lack of message discipline and preference for speaking directly to his fan base.
The administration has erected other barriers to transparency as well, such as refusing to make its visitor logs public. And Trump hasn’t held a full press conference since February or participated in interviews since the end of April.
The White House’s less-is-best approach to public information has become more pronounced since Trump returned from his nine-day, five-nation tour in late May.
White House officials believed the trip garnered good coverage even though the president eschewed a longtime presidential tradition of holding a news conference overseas and provided only limited public press briefings. About the same time, probes into Russian election interference and the Trump campaign’s possible role in it provided fresh incentive for the president and White House officials to avoid question-and-answer sessions sure to be dominated by the unwelcome topic.
White House communications officials “obviously feel it has ceased to pay dividends” to follow their predecessors’ press strategy, said Eric Dezenhall, who worked on President Ronald Reagan’s communications team and leads a public relations firm in Washington. “They’ve decided to bypass the media completely and stop pretending there’s anything to gain.”
Dezenhall said that while he understands the strategy, “it’s terrifying from a democracy standpoint.”
“You get assertion but no argument. You get attack but no justification,” he said. “These are ideal formats for someone who does not want to be held accountable. You’re being asked to accept on authority that this is all that you need to know.”