President-elect Trump’s transition into the White House has been fraught with clashes with the press, but veterans of White House press operations say it’s not too late for the icy relationship to thaw, and that it’s in Trump’s interest to use the press to his advantage.
Trump has continued to aggressively attack the press in the weeks before he is sworn in on Jan. 20. On Friday, for example, Trump lashed out at reports that said he backtracked on his promise to make Mexico pay for a border wall.
“The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!” he tweeted.
Trump has also tweeted recently that Russia is “playing CNN and NBC News for such fools,” and has twice left the press pool as president-elect: once to play golf, and once to go out to dinner in New York City.
It’s largely unclear if he and his staff plan to keep up the hostilities once he is sworn into office, or take a more cooperative route. But Mike McCurry, former White House press secretary in the Clinton administration, said Trump’s antics so far don’t necessarily mean he has to have a disastrous relationship with the press going forward.
“By definition, this is an adversarial relationship and it should be,” Mike McCurry said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “The press is supposed to be skeptical and hold accountable the president and the White House on behalf of the American people. That has been a long established tradition.”
McCurry said, though, that the relationship should not be acrimonious. He suggested that Sean Spicer, Trump’s incoming press secretary, should establish a mutually beneficial rapport with the media.
But Spicer and incoming Chief of Staff Reince Preibus have both indicated in public remarks that Trump’s communications team will not operate the same way as those of past administrations have.
On Wednesday, Spicer said the daily briefing was likely to change and that he may even prohibit TV news outlets from broadcasting the events live some days, where as they currently have the option to do it daily. He said, however, that there would be “something” daily for the press.
But McCurry said the Trump administration won’t easily be able to completely separate from reporters.
“They can’t get around the White House press,” said McCurry. “They can try to augment information to the public using their own devices, including tweets at 6:30 a.m. But there’s no getting around the fact that most Americans will get information about the White House from the White House press corps.”
He added that even though Trump has effectively harnessed the power of social media, “You cannot run a government on 140 characters a moment.”
Ari Fleischer, who served as a press secretary under President George W. Bush, said the Trump administration should maintain a daily press briefing but did say it was smart to rethink how it is conducted.
“Given the way the American people have changed their consumption of media, I think it’s worth thinking through whether or not to rotate who occupies the seats,” he said in an interview in November. “And to broaden it. It should continue to include the White House press corps but you could rotate days. You could, for example, have one day business press, another day foreign policy press, another day conservative press, another day liberal press. I think what’s important is that it be open broadly. It would be reflective of many.”
Though Trump and his team have indicated a departure from the norm when it comes to how this White House will approach the national media, at least some journalists have suggested they’re hopeful.
Leaders of the White House Correspondents’ Association, which currently has a big hand in how the daily White House briefings operate, met Friday with Trump’s communications team in New York.
Jeff Mason, president of the WHCA, said they he was “pleased” with the talks and that they “look forward to working with president elect’s team.”
