Failure....

Trump’s One Summit Win Was Over the Media

The president couldn’t find a way to agree with Kim Jong Un, but he could at least keep disagreeing with White House reporters.

By JACK SHAFER

There’s extra trouble brewing between Donald Trump and the press and, as usual, it’s of the president’s making.

As you’ve probably read, the White House barred reporters from Reuters, The Associated Press, Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times from covering Trump’s dinner with Kim Jong Un on Wednesday at the Hanoi summit. Their exclusion was White House retaliation for episodes earlier in the day when Reuters and AP scribes shouted questions at Trump at the “pool sprays” convened for reporters and photographers to record his meeting with the North Korean leader.

By conventional pool-spray standards, there was nothing untoward about the shouted questions. Ordinarily, Trump relishes the shoot-out pyrotechnics of spray interviews, as NPR reported two months into Trump’s administration. For Trump, a spray is the next best thing to a campaign rally, allowing him to convert the dullness of a photo op—shaking hands, signing a bill, meeting a dignitary or walking out of the White House to board Marine One—into a multimedia celebration that can play all day on the cable news networks. It’s almost as good for his ego as appearing on Page Six.

Back on April 3, 2018, Trump attempted to end a pool spray five or six times by saying, “Thank you,” the magic words that are supposed to close a spray. But every time he said the words, he took additional questions, and continued jabbering about the caravan, Vladimir Putin, defending the Baltics, Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service, and finally about Scott Pruitt, at which point the interview ended.

Then why Trump’s freakout in Hanoi? White House press secretary Sarah Sanders justified the reporters’ exclusion by citing “sensitivities over shouted questions in the previous sprays,” and allowed just one U.S. reporter, Vivian Salama of the Wall Street Journal, to witness the dinner.

Let’s examine those alleged “sensitivities.”

The record shows that Trump saw fit to answer three Korea-related queries. The question that poured sand in his gears was about Michael Cohen’s prepared remarks for Congress—he gave only a scowl and a head shake.

This isn’t the first time a pool-spray question about Cohen has steamed the president. In July 2018, CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins was “disinvited” from an open Rose Garden press event after calling out a set of Cohen questions to Trump at the conclusion of a press session with a visiting dignitary. “Did Michael Cohen betray you, Mr. President?” she asked twice. According to Collins, Sanders and Bill Shine, the White House deputy chief of staff for communications, told her the questions were “inappropriate” for the setting.

The Collins dust-up eventually passed, but the Hanoi meltdown indicates that Trump’s extreme touchiness about Cohen continues. Surely this has not gone unnoticed by the press. You can fully expect CNN’s Jim Acosta to loft a Cohen question at the president when he returns to the White House.

Compounding Trump’s fury, perhaps, was the context in which the questions arrived, and the fact that the summit failed to produce an agreement. Trump was watching Kim and Kim was watching Trump. Any question addressed to Trump about his scandal automatically translated into a loss of face in front of Kim, so when it arrived, it seared our scandal-ridden president with a lasting burn. Later during the summit, Trump told the press, “Don’t raise your voice, please,” when asking Kim questions. “This isn’t like dealing with Trump.”

To be fair to Trump, he isn’t the first American leader to block reporters from an international meeting. As the Washington Post reports today, President Barack Obama allowed only photographers to document his meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Wen Jiabao in Bali in 2011. In 2009, reporters were not allowed to ask questions when Obama met with China president Hu Jintao. “During a trip by Vice President Joe Biden to Beijing in 2011, U.S. reporters were ushered out of a meeting by Chinese security officials as Biden was still making his opening remarks, leading to a scuffle,” the paper reports.

If shouted questions rile Trump’s sensitivities, it’s well within his power to put an end to them. Trump’s first spray came when he met with Obama in the Oval Office in late 2016, just after the election. As reporters started shouting their questions, Obama, who hated sprays, offered his successor this free, on-the-record advice. “Here’s a good rule,” Obama told Trump. “Don't answer a question when they just start yelling at you.”

Fat chance Trump will ever take that advice. Instead, he’ll continue wanting it both ways, basking in the eternal sunshine of the media mind when the answers to the questions come easy and banishing reporters when their questions make him crimson with rage.