President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming press secretary has claimed that White House reporters are “excited” to see him return to the Oval Office.
“If you talk to reporters off the record, they will tell you they are excited that President Trump will be back in the Oval Office because they know how much access they had to him and his press secretaries during his first term,” Karoline Leavitt told Fox & Friends on Thursday.
Off the record is a term for something expressed in confidence and not meant to be reported, so Leavitt was likely suggesting the unnamed journalists she was referring to would never say as much in public.
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Leavitt was responding to the Fox News morning chat show’s cohost Steve Doocy, who claimed the Trump administration, led by a well-documented serial liar, would be an honest contrast to that of President Joe Biden.
“This is gonna be such a change of pace from the last four years because when people in the briefing room ask actual questions they get something read out of a binder and it is not sometimes accurate and sometimes it’s just a flat out lie,” he said.
Doocy’s reference to the use of a binder during press briefings—something Biden secretaries Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre have done—is baffling because it’s common practice.
Photo evidence shows three of Trump’s four press secretaries during his first term used binders during media briefings.
The one who did not, Stephanie Grisham, only managed not to because of a technicality: she failed to hold a single press briefing during her 281-day tenure between July 2019 and April 2020.
However, photos show she nevertheless carried a binder with her while on the job.
As for whether reporters in the White House press room are excited to have Trump back because of how much apparent access they will have, history casts some doubt on Leavitt’s claim.
Biden has indeed been the least accessible president in the last four decades, in terms of media interviews and press conferences. His vice president, Kamala Harris, was criticized during the 2024 election for a lack of press accessibility before launching a media blitz closer to voting day.
But Trump has had his own clashes with the press, attacking the media more than 100 times in the lead-up to this year’s election.
He has called for journalists to be jailed and dubbed them the “enemy of the people.”
While he sometimes gave long press conferences during his first term in office, his White House took unprecedented steps to shut off access at times.
