Donald Trump, who won the presidency on a promise to return Washington to The People, apparently doesn’t want to give citizens the chance to watch as his spokespeople answer questions on topics ranging from health care to taxes to intemperate tweets.
Responding to questions about the White House’s decreasing number of press briefings and increasing restrictions on broadcasting those briefings live, press secretary Sean Spicer said he wanted to let “the president’s voice carry the day.”
Given that Trump has held only one full-length news conference since taking office, that often means that Americans need to wake up early, fire up their Twitter feed and catch the latest blast. On Thursday, the president delivered a doozy.
After steering clear of describing women with crude and dismissive language during his first months in office, Trump drew widespread condemnations from Republicans and Democrats alike when he used Twitter to criticize the intelligence and physical appearance of Mika Brzezinski, the female co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show.
In his tweets Thursday, the president called Brzezinski “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and claimed that she had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” during a social gathering at Trump’s Florida resort around New Year’s Eve. The blasts apparently came from Trump’s feeling aggrieved by less-than-admiring talk about him on “Morning Joe.”
The online outburst undercut the president’s already tenuous support on Capitol Hill and beyond, as his fellow Republicans led the way in condemning his words as insulting and unfit for the president.
“My first reaction was that this just has to stop, and I was disheartened because I had hoped the personal, ad hominem attacks had been left behind, that we were past that,” said Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine whose support Trump needs to repeal Obamacare.
“Stop it!” tweeted Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican whose support Trump also needs. “The presidential platform should be used for more than bringing people down.”
The outburst harkened to the presidential campaign, when Trump came under regular fire for disparaging women. He poked fun at actress Kim Novak, a 1950s movie star, for her plastic surgeries when she appeared at the 2014 Academy Awards, sending her into humiliated seclusion. In a 2015 presidential debate, he remarked that female moderator Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever” after she grilled him about his misogyny. And he used his Twitter feed to call female journalists “crazy” and “neurotic” even as he defended himself over his boasts of grabbing women by the genitals.
While Trump seems to mostly get himself in trouble when left to his own devices, he seems to have given his blessing to increasingly tight restrictions on press briefings. Those briefings have historically served as a way for reporters to give the public a fuller understanding of the work of a busy president, allowing the White House to both amplify its positions and respond to criticisms.
The shift was so dramatic that it recently prompted a protest from the White House Correspondents’ Association. The group’s leader, Jeff Mason of the Reuters news service, said, “We believe strongly that Americans should be able to watch and listen to senior government officials face questions from an independent news media.”
To be sure, those media representatives sometimes ill-serve the public when failing to raise some important questions while obsessing over others. But for the most part, they do their best to hold the world’s most powerful leader to account, a role vital to democracy and secured by the First Amendment.
Let the cameras roll, Mr. President. And maybe give your Twitter finger a rest — unless it’s pointing in the direction of a newfound awareness of how your boorish remarks demean women and debase the office you are privileged to serve.