President Trump has held three times as many short question and answer sessions with reporters than former President Barack Obama at this point in his administration, but has given half as many interviews, according to a statistical analysis released Thursday.
Trump engaged reporters in 170 short question and answer sessions during his first 465 days in office, a window that ended Tuesday, compared to Obama’s 55 short Q&As, which generally are with members of the White House press pool.
Although Trump speaks much more frequently with reporters on the tarmac before boarding Air Force One or on the South Lawn before climbing aboard a helicopter designated Marine One, he’s given far fewer one-on-one interviews. Obama gave 187 interviews in his first 465 days, compared to Trump’s 95.
The data was compiled by White House Transition Project director Martha Kumar, an emeritus professor at Towson University who painstakingly catalogs White House press exchanges, including at daily briefings.
Trump’s sessions with reporters constituted 42 percent of his public utterances, according to Kumar, versus 31 percent of Obama’s. This data does not consider Trump’s tweets, of which there were 3,201, an average of nearly seven a day.
“In their first year, presidents and their staffs test what communications strategies work and in what forums he is comfortable responding to reporters,” Kumar wrote in the report.
Trump favored short question and answers sessions with reporters and tweets, Kumar wrote, whereas Obama was drawn to interviews.
“Where there are interview records to compare presidents, Obama had more interviews with reporters than any of his predecessors,” Kumar wrote. “Interviews allow a president to target the people they want to talk to and the news organizations they want to satisfy. Obama, for example, used them to advance his policy initiatives, such as Trade Promotion Authority. … President Trump has used them to focus attention on his conservative base by favoring interviews with Fox News and other conservative television organizations.”
Kumar has a desk near the West Wing’s Brady Press Briefing Room and her research is well regarded. The new report was circulated by the White House Correspondents’ Association on its listserv.
Acccording to Kumar’s research, Trump and Obama gave similar numbers of public remarks and addresses (533 and 645, respectively) and press conferences (27 and 30), though only one of Trump’s was without a foreign leader, versus 13 of Obama’s.
Although Trump is more likely to engage reporters informally, Kumar reported that “in a comparison of all presidents from Woodrow Wilson forward, President Trump is the only president to have just one solo press conference in his first 465 days in office.”
Kumar’s new report includes data comparing Trump against other recent presidents, going back to former President Ronald Reagan. Only former President Bill Clinton had a higher rate of early-term engagement with the press as a percentage of his public utterances, with about double the number of short Q&As as Trump and nearly double the press conferences.
