Though President-elect Trump is everywhere on TV and in the newspapers, the media would like everyone to believe he’s sheltered himself in an underground bunker, hiding from everybody but his Twitter and maybe Don King.
It’s become a point of outrage among reporters and pundits that the president-elect hasn’t held a press conference since July.
You’ll recall those long, winding events in the Republican primary in which Trump would answer dozens of questions and reporters would react with Lamaze breathing to cope with whatever he said.
When Trump hosted a press conference in March, he used the event to rebut Mitt Romney, who had attacked him as a “fraud,” and his past business ventures as failures.
The media complained that Trump had turned the conference into a commercial for his brand.
When he hosted a conference in June at one of his golf courses in Scotland, the media accused him of a bait-and-switch that was surreptitiously intended to show off his property.
And when he hosted his latest conference in July, the media nearly collapsed into a vacuum after he joked that Russian hackers should release Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails.
The New York Times laughably interpreted the line as Trump having “essentially urg[ed] a foreign adversary to conduct cyberespionage against a former secretary of state.”
So shocking and undignified were Trump’s half-hour Q&As with the press that now that it’s been a while since he’s had one — the media want more of them!
“Still no news conference from President-elect Trump,” read a CNN headline, just a little over a week after Election Day.
A Dec. 20 headline at The Hill asked, “When will Trump hold a press conference?”
Washington Post blogger Philip Bump put together a post titled, “Why you should want Donald Trump to do press conferences, regardless of how you feel about him.”
The criticism is crafted in a way that suggests Trump has taken the elevator to the top of his tower in New York and shut the lights off.
But since winning the election, in addition to tweeting his plans and his responses to whatever the news of the day is, Trump has done several interviews. And not with Sean Hannity.
On Nov. 11, the Wall Street Journal interviewed Trump and broke the news that he was open to keeping certain parts of Obamacare intact.
Leslie Stahl of CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed him for a special that aired two days later, during which he was confronted for having recruited lobbyists for his transition team, despite campaigning hard against lobbyists and special interests.
And on Nov. 23, Trump went to what is still the most revered journalism institution in the country. He sat for 75 minutes for an on-the-record interview with dozens of New York Times journalists and editors.
After that, he gave an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace that aired Dec. 11 and then, this week, he answered questions for nearly seven minutes from the press pool that follows him.
And it’s not as if Trump has ever been an evasive figure, running around in a cloak.
Between January and September, after he and Clinton were both named their party’s nominees, he hosted 10 press conferences whereas she only held three (two of which were held in-flight on her campaign airplane, and one of those ended early because she couldn’t stop coughing).
At the time, the total number of press conference minutes from Trump: 278.
For Clinton: 38.
(Clinton was about as open as a gay dance club in Iran. But the Democratic National Committee thinks it’s making a sharp point when it sends out a helpful email reminder every few days that asks, “When was Trump’s last press conference?”)
The national media can breathe a little easier, though.
Sean Spicer, recently appointed as Trump’s White House press secretary, said in an interview this week that they do “owe the press conference” and that it will take place in January.
Finally, the press will get to ask some questions.
Eddie Scarry is a media reporter for the Washington Examiner. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
