Unacceptable: It's been one full year since Donald Trump's one and only solo press conference
Donald Trump is public servant. He is accountable to the American people. At least he should be, right? So why are his colleagues and the media allowing him to get away with not answering to the American people? It is standard for American presidents to hold regular press conferences to answer questions from reporters. Donald Trump has done that precisely once since taking office. Here’s how that stacks up against other presidents in their first year (stats courtesy of USA Today):
Why isn’t there more pressure for Donald Trump to answer to the American people via our free press? During the 2016 campaign, cable news shows were apocalyptic that candidate Hillary Clinton had gone several months without holding a press conference. They had graphics with clocks counting the days, minutes, seconds since Hillary Clinton’s last press conference. Chris Cillizza was relentless in his desire to hold Hillary Clinton’s feet to the fire. From his Washington Post article, “Hillary Clinton hasn’t held a press conference in 257 days. That’s ridiculous.”
Donald Trump said lots (and lots) of thing during his hour-long town hall with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Wednesday night. This one — Trump talking about Hillary Clinton — stood out to me:
She is so protected. They are so protecting her. She hasn’t had a news conference in, like, 250 days.
It couldn’t be that long since Clinton has talked to the press, I thought. So, I went to the handy-dandy tool that some guy named Philip Bump built to track how long it’s been since Clinton faced the press. And this is what I found:
Almost 258 days! Trump undersold something!
Jokes aside, it’s beyond ridiculous that one of the two people who will be elected president in 80 or so days continues to refuse to engage with the press in this way.
Who needs protection now? Where are the bold graphics, the clocks on every cable news network? Where is the drumbeat from the free press to hold Donald Trump accountable and demand a press conference? This administration doesn’t even hold regular press briefings, cancelling two days in a row despite deep crisis, another mass murder in a public school and indictments of 13 Russian nationals who interfered in the 2016 campaign.
For what it’s worth, during that one and only press conference, Donald Trump called the Russia investigation a “scam” by the media, repeatedly said the American people shouldn’t believe the “fake news” from the likes of CNN, defending the now indicted Mike Flynn, said he would do “something” to Putin, but won’t tell us what (he didn’t do a thing) and said he hoped Putin would be his friend. HIf you want to walk down memory lane, here is that long ago press conference, held 365 days ago. In Cillizza terms, that’s 525,600 minutes ago.
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