President Donald Trump hosted most of the nation’s governors for a working breakfast at the White House on Friday, but opted to kick the press out.
Just as the meeting was set to start in the State Dining Room, Trump told reporters to leave.
“We’re going to be asking the press to leave,” he said from the presidential lectern. “We’re going to talk very candidly and take questions, I think, at the end.”
“I just said to [White House chief of staff] Susie [Wiles], ‘What about questions?’” Trump added. “‘Sir, you can do whatever you want.’ I don’t know if she says that to other people she’s represented over the years, but thank you very much for being here. It’s a great honor, and the media — thank you. You can leave now.”
The president did field one shouted question from the press on his walk up to the lectern about whether he was considering a limited strike on Iran to force it to the negotiating table.
“I guess, I can say, I am considering that,” he told reporters.
The governors’ meeting at the White House follows days of turmoil over the administration’s handling of the event.
Despite inviting all governors to the White House in prior years, the president originally opted to invite only Republican governors this year. This prompted Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK), chairman of the National Governors Association, to say that the NGA would back out of the event, and Trump himself to brand Stitt as a “Republican in name only.”
Stitt later said that, after speaking with the president, the exclusion of Democrats should be attributed to a “misunderstanding in scheduling.”
Even after the dustup with Stitt, Trump excluded two Democratic lawmakers from an invite list for Friday’s event that made the rounds earlier this week, Wes Moore of Maryland and Jared Polis of Colorado.
Polis, speaking on MS Now Thursday morning, called the snub “a blow against the governors as a whole.”
Moore, the vice-chairman of the NGA, has been publicly feuding with the president regarding the cleanup of the Potomac River sewage spill and said that the White House had opted not to invite him to the breakfast.
However, a source familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner that the White House invited him on Thursday, and Moore also confirmed his attendance in a statement early Friday morning. He ended up sitting at a table with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
“I remain ready and willing to find common ground, produce results for the people of Maryland, and fight to ensure my fellow governors can do the same for the people they represent,” he wrote. “I will attend today’s business meeting with my colleagues at the White House. But let me be abundantly clear: I will not participate in political stunts.”
Last year, the governors’ breakfast featured a heated moment between Trump and Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) over the president’s policies seeking to bar transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.
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Mills was among the group of Democratic governors who planned to boycott Friday’s breakfast over Polis and Moore’s exclusion from the invite list.
Watch Trump’s incredibly brief public comments at the breakfast in full below: