Trump’s White House Is Rewriting The Rules For The Press

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The first White House press briefing of the year was nothing short of a spectacle. Stepping confidently to the podium for the first time, Karoline Leavitt, the youngest press secretary in history, wasted no time signaling that the Trump administration’s approach to media relations would be anything but conventional.

In a move bound to send the legacy press on the back burner, Karoline Leavitt unveiled a “New Media seat”—an innovation outside the WHCA’s control, for which she invited “influencers, bloggers, podcasters” to apply. X ranters or Rumble streamers might soon be sitting next to the The New York Times.

To bring the point home, Leavitt, did what no press secretary before her had done: she bypassed the wire services and handed the first questions to Breitbart and Axios, arguing that these new media members represented some of the country’s most widely read news sources yet had long been denied a presence in the White House briefing room.

Amid the changing media landscape Trump has approved opening the press room to new media voices “to share the president’s message with as many Americans as possible.”‘

If the press room atmosphere had resembled a West Wing premiere, it was no accident. The briefing was standing-room only, a stark contrast to the past four years when Karine Jean-Pierre’s briefings often felt performative.

Karoline Leavitt then dropped another bombshell: the Trump White House would be restoring the 440 press credentials that the Biden administration had stripped away. She left no room for ambiguity, declaring that the previous administration had “wrongly revoked” those credentials from journalists.

As the questions rolled in, unlike her predecessor, Leavitt fielded questions from all corners of the room, including those in the back rows, where reporters under Jean-Pierre had often been ignored.

The questioning, it must be said, was remarkably civil—one might even say subdued. No doubt, the fourth estate was keen to get a read on the new regime, and no one was in a hurry to earn an early reputation for antagonizing the Trump White House.

Leavitt, for her part, leaned into the moment. She also made sure to highlight Trump’s recent media omnipresence, rattling off a list of engagements—multiple news conferences, Air Force One gaggles, a two-part Fox News interview. As Politico put it bluntly: “Trump is everywhere again.”

Indeed. The man who never met a microphone he didn’t like is back, and with him, a press operation that is—by all appearances—determined to remake the rules of media engagement. Whether this is a return to a “golden age” of freewheeling press access or merely a more sophisticated means of message control remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: the Trump era 2.0 will be anything but dull.

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