Using Marine One as a backdrop, the White House has replaced formal briefings [which haven’t been held in more than five months] with impromptu chats where the president sets all the rules.
It was another bravura performance of “Chopper Talk.”
The latest iteration of President Donald Trump’s signature news conferences in front of a thwapping Marine One on Wednesday was a whirligig of boastfulness, slingshot attacks and public self-therapy — in other words, vintage Trump.
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Wednesday’s careening, impromptu 35-minute news conference may have looked bizarre to veteran observers of the White House, not to mention maddening to television pros accustomed to high-quality audio and video production values. But there’s a method to the seeming madness.
The “Chopper Talk” sessions, as comedian Stephen Colbert has dubbed them, serve multiple goals for Trump, reporters and White House insiders say. They allow him to speak more often in front of the cameras than his predecessors, yet firmly on his own terms. He scans the pack of reporters, seizing on questions he wants, while ignoring others. He makes headline-ready pronouncements and airs grievances for anywhere from a few minutes to a half-hour — and then walks away when he’s had enough.
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“If he was at a podium, we would be pressing him after he answers the question, we would be correcting him, we would be pointing out discrepancies in previous answers, and we’re not able to do that in the chaotic setting of a departure,” said CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang.
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"[T]hey are terrible for reporters. It is impossible to hear, have a substantive dialogue, ask a follow-up question or do any serious pressing of the president. It is a fucking circus[,” said one White House reporter.]
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Meanwhile, Trump has become his own de facto communications chief, setting policy and sparking controversies via Twitter and shifting the action from the staid briefing room to a roaring helicopter waiting on the South Lawn.
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If Trump is departing on Marine One in the late morning, “he always comes out of the Oval Office, even if he hasn’t been to the Oval Office, because it makes him look like he’s been working all day,” said a second White House reporter.
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“You basically have a jet airplane parked on the South Lawn,” said former Obama White House official Tommy Vietor in describing the “genius” of Trump’s Marine One pressers on a recent episode of “Pod Save the World.”
“You can’t hear the questions — he ignores anything that he doesn’t like,” said Vietor. “He just literally screams idiotic things like ‘I know nothing about Russia’ to this gaggle of the press. And there’s nothing they can do about it.”
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[Doug Mills, a veteran New York Times photographer and board member of the White House Correspondents’ Association] said there are now “guidelines,” not rules, for how journalists should congregate as Trump arrives and departs. They enter in groups, as at the airport, with the radio pool reporter followed by inhouse White House pool. Next come the correspondents, with a fourth group including additional still photographers.
Such conventions became necessary as this unconventional news conference became routine. “Your jaw drops when he walks past and just waves,” Mills said. “Everyone stands there, ‘He’s not going to talk?’”
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Unlike the briefing room, with its assigned seats, the makeshift news conferences have led to tensions on the White House grounds, especially when pool reporters responsible for providing information to the press corps as a whole found themselves out of earshot to cover the news.
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And the loud noise of the rotor blades whirring in the background gives Trump a convenient excuse to respond to a question as he interprets it, instead of directly answering the question as it was phrased.
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“He’ll just hear a word that catches his attention like ‘racism’ or ‘the squad’ or whatever the topic is, and he’ll just deliver what he’s probably already been tweeting about and what he already firmly believes so that can be difficult,” said Jiang.
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[At one session, Trump] pushed a baseless claim that he lost New Hampshire in the 2016 election because “thousands of thousands of people” came into the state to vote from “locations unknown.” Trump claimed to know the “unknown” location, but when a reporter asked where he was referring to, he just ignored the question.
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[White House communications director Stephanie] Grisham said last week that Trump is “so accessible” that she doesn’t “know what any of the press could complain about.”
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“The fact that the White House press corps can no longer grandstand on TV is of no concern to us.”
Politico
