President Donald Trump, who hasn’t held a solo press conference since February, on Wednesday night spent more than an hour talking with reporters who were traveling with him to Paris.
But the journalists aboard Air Force One didn’t report Thursday morning what he said. The conversation ― which comes amid investigations into Trump associates’ links to Russia, along with increased scrutiny on close family members’ roles during the 2016 campaign ― was designated off the record.
“Why did the reporters allow that to happen?” Tim Grieve, McClatchy’s vice president for news, asked on Twitter. “If POTUS has something to say to the press, he can say it on the record.”
Grieve wasn’t alone in questioning the decision to give Trump the courtesy to speak off the record, particularly during this newsy time that comes amid a news conference drought.
As journalists on social media debated the ground rules on Thursday, Trump seemed to retroactively change them following his meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Trump asked New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who is traveling with the president, why she didn’t publish his remarks from the previous night and asked if she heard him say they could be used on the record, according to a pool report she filed for the press corps. Haberman recalled telling Trump she was under the impression that the remarks were off the record since deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had declared them as such.
Sanders later told HuffPost the White House would “release some excerpts from the conversation.”
The White House’s decision created a dilemma for the reporters, with the Trump team now appearing to unilaterally decide what parts of an off-the-record conversation would be made public. Such ground rules are traditionally hashed out between the two parties of a conversation.
Some journalists suggested that reporters shouldn’t abide by the original off-the-record ground rules and that the new arrangement is effectively quote-approval, a practice news organizations typically balk at.
Journalists have given past presidents, including Barack Obama, the opportunity to visit the back of the plane on foreign trips and speak off the record. The reasoning, typically, is that it’s helpful to hear the president speak candidly and that such insights can better inform future reporting.
And journalists have allowed Trump to speak off the record when desired, even as he has maligned the media and dubbed it “the enemy of the people.” Last month, Trump bashed the “fake news” media at a raucous Iowa rally and then spoke off the record to reporters for nearly half an hour on the flight back to Washington.
The off-the-record discussion this week came hours after Trump tweeted about how the “Fake Media” makes up sources for stories, an unproven claim he’s made before to deflect scrutiny of his administration.
The president has bucked tradition by holding only one solo, full-scale news conference during his first six months in office. This tally is fewer than any of Trump’s predecessors at this point in their presidencies since Ronald Reagan, according to Yahoo News.
Trump has held about a dozen bilateral news conferences with foreign leaders, and participated in another one on Thursday with Macron. But these exchanges typically allow for only two questions from each of the leaders’ respective press corps, not an opportunity for Trump to face sustained questions.
And although Trump did sit down with Reuters on Wednesday, most of his recent interviews have been with sympathetic hosts on Fox News or supporters like Pat Robertson, the televangelist who has suggested the president’s critics are serving Satan. There have also been no televised daily press briefings over the past two weeks, and journalists have said both on- and off-camera briefings increasingly yield little useful or new information.
The Trump White House’s commitment to press access was also questioned Thursday when pool reporters, the rotating group of journalists trailing the president for the larger press corps, didn’t get to cover his remarks at the U.S. ambassador’s house in Paris.
Haberman, the pool reporter on duty, informed her colleagues in the press that she learned from the president’s official Twitter feed that he had given remarks “to assembled service members and their families while the pool was kept in a holding room downstairs.”
Other reporters noted the lack of coverage.
Sanders told HuffPost that “it’s protocol that the press does not cover the meet and greets at the embassy.”
“This was standard in previous administrations as well,” she said.
In a later pool report, Haberman said some veteran White House reporters had told her that they had covered such meet-and-greets during the previous administration.
This article was updated after Trump appeared to change the off-the-record ground rules.
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