Clamping down, Trump team puts the 'brief' in press briefing
Sean Spicer, the embattled press secretary, spoke for 30 minutes Tuesday and didn't answer a number of basic questions, including whether the president believes Russia interfered in the 2016 election and whether Trump had seen the hotly debated Senate health care bill.
Once more freewheeling exchanges, White House press briefings have been shrinking both in length and content as Trump's senior aides clamp down on information and contend with the president's own lack of message discipline and preference for speaking directly to his fan base.
The administration has erected other barriers to transparency as well, such as refusing to make its visitor logs public.
White House officials believed the trip garnered good coverage even though the president eschewed a longtime presidential tradition of holding a news conference overseas and provided only limited public press briefings.
About the same time, probes into Russian election interference and the Trump campaign's possible role in it provided fresh incentive for the president and White House officials to avoid question-and-answer sessions sure to be dominated by the unwelcome topic.
White House communications officials "obviously feel it has ceased to pay dividends" to follow their predecessors' press strategy, said Eric Dezenhall, who worked on President Ronald Reagan's communications team and leads a public relations firm in Washington.
David Boardman, chairman of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said Trump's method of communicating via Twitter creates a compelling need "to follow up on those 140-character proclamations with questions."
"The president has a long history of communicating directly with people through social media that has worked out very well for him in the past," said Katrina Pierson, a former Trump campaign spokeswoman.