Trump’s media team in chaos

As US president threatens to ban press briefings, aides struggle to cope

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump’s shock dismissal of FBI chief James Comey last week not only unleashed a political firestorm in Washington – it also revealed the discordant sounds emanating from his communications team.

It was a complicated week for the Republican billionaire and his spokesmen – one that earned him a mountain of negative press.

His aides conveyed a somewhat scattershot message, and Trump was reportedly angry.

Trump then turned to Twitter, his communications method of choice, to issue a threat – the possible scrapping of the daily White House briefings.

“Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future ‘press briefings’ and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???” he mused, admitting that his own people were struggling to keep up with his “active” presidency.

Trump then doubled down on the idea in an interview with Fox News,

He needs to empower his people and spokesmen to understand what’s happening and be okay to legally communicate it to the world.

Josh Earnest

saying: “We just don’t have them, unless I have them every two weeks and I do them myself.

“We don’t have them. I think it’s a good idea.”

“You have a level of hostility that’s incredible and it’s very unfair,” Trump told the network in an interview.

But Trump’s critics said the hiccups in his media operation were his own fault, and questioned his willingness to impugn the credibility of his own team members, whom the president said could not “stand at podium with perfect accuracy”.

“He needs to empower his people and spokesmen to understand what’s happening and be okay to legally communicate it to the world,” Josh Earnest, the former spokesman for Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, told MSNBC. “That is a flaw at the top.” Former White House communications director Jen Psaki said the week’s events had raised questions about whether Trump’s spokesmen “are prepared, and whether credibility and honesty are valued”.

“That is troubling not just in the United States but around the world,” Psaki, also a former State Department spokeswoman, told the media.

The embattled White House spokesman Sean Spicer – who had been off for a few days on Naval Reserve duty – returned to the podium on Friday, where he faced a grilling from reporters.

On whether Trump was surreptitiously recording Oval Office meetings, Spicer said he had “nothing further to add on that”.

As for the tweet to Comey, Spicer said: “That’s not a threat.

“He simply stated a fact. The tweet speaks for itself.”

But the spokesman admitted he and his staff sometimes “don’t have an opportunity to get in to see him to get his full thinking”.

Earnest said that situation was untenable and not Spicer’s fault.

“There are days when Sean Spicer can’t get into the Oval Office before he does the briefing,” said Earnest, who had served as Obama’s primary spokesman to the media for three years.

“That’s not Sean’s fault. “That’s the fault of the president of the United States.” — AFP