White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump has revolutionized presidential communication as he prepares to skip the annual White House Correspondents Dinner again.
“President Trump has revolutionized the way a president communicates,” Leavitt said in an interview with Axios one day before the black tie event, held each year at a Washington, D.C., hotel.
She played up Trump’s frequent interactions with the media in contrast to former President Joe Biden, who “hid from the press. ” She said Trump’s direct interaction with the public via social media makes him much more transparent than previous presidents.
However, that’s not how White House Correspondents Association President Eugene Daniels sees it.
Daniels lamented Trump’s actions against the press and the WHCA, saying Trump has been even more hostile than he was during his first term.
“Just because the White House made the ill-advised decision in taking over the press pool, that doesn’t mean the work that we do for our members has stopped,” said Daniels, who recently left Politico for a hosting gig at MSNBC.
Since taking office for a second time, Trump has kicked the Associated Press out of the Oval Office and off Air Force One, taken over the rotation for reporters who get privileged access to White House events, and threatened to take over seating assignments in the press briefing room.
His administration has portrayed those moves as a win for the media and the public because they allow nontraditional “new media” outlets inside the White House.
“We view it as opening access to more outlets, more voices, more news journalists,” Leavitt said.
She also criticized the WHCA board that Daniels leads, calling it a “small group of journalists” who enjoyed a “monopoly” over the briefing room and press pool access.
“There should be equal access for all outlets, and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” she said.
Daniels took issue with that characterization on multiple fronts.
One of his core arguments was that government officials, including the president, should not dictate who gets to cover them. Another is that outlets now getting access do not necessarily adhere to the same professional standards as those vetted by the WHCA.
“We have quite a bit of our team, our reporters that are in [the pool],” he said. “But then we have people in there who are asking questions about the president’s weight, or whatever, like ‘is he skinny now?’ and those kinds of things are not what the American people expect from reporters who cover the most important office in the land.”
Those differing viewpoints are coming to a head as Trump will miss Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner, a celebration of the Washington news media that he has never attended as president.
This year, the WHCA also took the unusual step of canceling the evening’s entertainer. It would have been comedian Amber Ruffin, but she was scrapped after making anti-Trump comments in a podcast interview.
Daniels further argued that now is not the time for jokes.
“It feels like a comedic performance — and we haven’t replaced anyone, so we have foregone comedy in general — the types of videos that we’re showing on Saturday night are going to be different and look different than they have in the past,” he said. “They are a little more earnest than funny.”
Leavitt rejected the notion that the Trump administration is hurting the press or presidential access, pointing to Trump’s recent interview with Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg as proof he’s not shying away from harsh questions.
“We always want to respect the First Amendment,” she said, “but I don’t wrestle with the fact that we’re infringing on the First Amendment in any way, because I don’t believe that we are.”
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For now, the White House and the WHCA will have to agree to disagree on that point.
“It’s a new normal that no one asked for,” Daniels said. “The American people are losing out.”