On Wednesday night Donald Trump held an impromptu press conference with longtime campaign ally Don King. It was the first “press conference” the president-elect had held in five months, and while he took questions from the reporters gathered outside his Palm Beach estate, the surprise Q&A session felt like more of a circus than an informational session. And if what his appointed press secretary Sean Spicer said Thursday morning is correct, Wednesday’s media gathering may be the first step towards the new administration’s unique (and weird) approach to handling the press.
During an appearance on The Hugh Hewitt Show, Spicer told his host “business as usual is over” when it comes to how the Trump administration will proceed with its media relationships. That’s because the president-elect won’t necessarily, as Hewitt phrased it, “keep up a regular and as energetic a series of press conferences as previous presidents” have. Instead, the reality television star turned politician is mulling over his options:
“I think the thing that you’ve seen with Donald Trump is that he doesn’t, he doesn’t look to the past and say I’ve got to conform to these precedents,” Spicer said. “He figures out what’s the best way. And so maybe we do, you know, a series of press conferences, but maybe we do some town hall, you know, Facebook town halls. Maybe we go out and solicit input from Twitter. I don’t, I mean, the answer is we’re looking at a lot of things.”
The horror of an American president interacting with purveyors of fake news on Facebook or Twitter eggs notwithstanding, Spicer did relent somewhat when Hewitt pushed him about Trump’s keeping close ties to traditional media outlets in print and cable television. “We recognize that there’s, you know, a few thousand readers or so left that still look at the New York Times,” he sniped much in the same way his boss has in the past. “So it’s worth, probably, talking to them. We’re going to utilize various outlets to continue the conversation.”
(Via Politico and The Daily Beast)