I’m a White House reporter. Here’s a side of the Trump administration you won’t see on TV

When Donald Trump took the oath of office a year ago, I was staring at a laptop screen in the White House briefing room, shielding myself from the absurdly cold air that flooded the small space whenever someone opened the door.

As he gave not one but two separate addresses at the Capitol — the first a traditional post-inauguration speech in the Capitol Rotunda, then a second, more partisan and unscripted rant to supporters seated in the overflow area — I looked up to see a colleague from another news outlet who, like me, had been in the White House since Trump’s first term. First.

As the president talks about the various grievances and setbacks he’s faced since losing the 2020 election and decamping to Florida for what was a brief exile from power under the Biden administration, she rolls her eyes and turns to me.

“Here we go again,” she said.

Those of us covering Trump’s first administration know what to expect. Boy, were we wrong.

His first four years in office were mostly a non-stop barrage of news that exhausted journalists but also provided a rotating cast of press secretaries and spokesmen with vast amounts of leaked information from different camps within the West Wing trying to backstab each other, as well as less useful — and often less truthful — information.

Sean Spicer’s now-infamous 2017 debut briefing room, during which he criticized the press for reporting the much smaller crowd that attended Trump’s first inauguration compared to Barack Obama’s inauguration, set the more or less characteristic tone for the next four years. Things got weird from there, his presence in the briefing room became so odd – remember “Holocaust Centers?” – that he was infamously parodied by Melissa McCarthy on Saturday Night Live.

Press briefings became fewer and farther between as Trump went from the often combative Spicer to the more amiable but equally helpless Sarah Huckabee Sanders (who is now living her best life as governor of Arkansas) to Stephanie Grissom, who hasn’t held a single press briefing in her entire tenure.

And even though Trump’s official schedule doesn’t start until mid-morning, reporters like me get used to arriving at the White House at 7 a.m. as administration officials, usually Kellyanne Conway, Join us in a pugilistic back and forth After appearing on Fox News.

The president himself discovered the briefing room during the Covid-19 pandemic, often spending as many as 90 minutes a day there as he took questions from a pared-down press corps while Americans sheltered at home.

And while Trump often likes to attack or ignore specific journalists or outlets, his administration has let us do our jobs.

We expected more of the same when Trump was sworn in for the second time, and as I and other colleagues greeted the incoming Trump II press staff — some of whom we knew from his previous tenure — on inauguration day, one person remarked to me that the atmosphere was “the first day of school,” which was more relaxed than it had been.

Well, guess again.

To be sure, there are positive differences between Trump I and Trump II from a beat reporter’s perspective. Whereas the Trump I press staff was more likely to yell than answer a question if you walked into their office, their counterparts in his second administration are often so cheerful and friendly that it’s more than a little disconcerting.

While Spicer, Sanders and Grisham run an amateurish and haphazard press shop, press secretary Carolyn Levitt and communications director Steven Cheung are typically behind-the-scenes professionals and regularly answer questions from their subordinates.

But overall, this administration has not been able to be like the last time.

Unlike the leaky ship that was Trump I, Trump’s White House is much more disciplined this time around. From a reporter’s point of view, this is actually not a good thing.

But the real difference is how Trump’s new-look team has implemented its militant attitude toward a free and independent press.

In February, Levitt’s office announced it would take control of a “pool” rotation under which a group of outlets — including independent – Cover Trump as he holds court in the Oval Office and travels the country on Air Force One.

While my colleagues and I still take our turn from reputable and legitimate news outlets and dutifully file the pool reports used by the rest of the press corps to write “the first draft of history,” we’ve been joined by a number of people handpicked by the White House while some outlets (like the AP) are currently banned by the courts. sRefusing to accept Trump’s declaration that the Gulf of Mexico is now called the Gulf of America.

Some newcomers come from conservative-leaning outlets who approach their work in a responsible, respectful manner. But others are, frankly, sycophants and clowns who do little to inform the American public.

Levitt has often prided himself on letting these people ask the first question at White House briefings (traditionally the AP’s role) in a “new media” seat in a section of the briefing room normally reserved for White House staff.

In one instance, she hosted infamous literary MAGA troll Benny Johnson there and let him start a briefing with a fabricated story of how he and his family fled Washington after he “set the house on fire” (according to the DC Fire Department, it was his neighbor’s house that was on fire).

Another Leavitt guest, beanie-wearing podcaster Tim Poole, used his time there to complain about how legitimate news outlets portrayed him and other “new media” seat grabbers, and asked Leavitt to join him in disparaging the mainstream press. Levitt responded diplomatically that the administration “welcomes different points of view.”

Recently, I (and others) have been placed on White House-authored lists of partisan attacks in retaliation for accurate reporting on the president’s own words and actions.

My counterparts in the Pentagon press corps and elsewhere in Washington have had it worse.

Last year, they surrendered their press credentials en masse after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded they sign documents promising not to ask anyone for information — the definition of propaganda — when publishing pre-approved information for the federal government or anything else.

They were replaced in the halls of the Pentagon by a group of sycophants and influencers aligned with Hegseth and his vision for his department.

An attempt at a briefing for the “new Pentagon press corps” saw seats in the Pentagon briefing room taken by self-described “proud Islamophobes” Laura Loomer and Matt Gaetz, a former congressman from Florida who was briefly Trump’s pick for attorney general before resigning from the House, finding fruitless committee charges in an effort to release the report. He had sexual relations with a 17-year-old girl and illegal drugs were also found in his possession. Getz has denied both allegations and a Justice Department investigation into Getz’s alleged actions with the girl has not led to any charges.

And just this past week, FBI agents searched the home of one The Washington Post A reporter who the government has accused of communicating with a suspected leaker — even though it’s not illegal for a journalist to obtain leaked documents, even classified ones.

Agents seized his phone and laptop, ostensibly as part of an investigation into a Defense Department employee who mishandled classified information, but perhaps as a warning to others who dared to correspond with reporters inside the government.

And while the president has largely avoided the briefing room during his first year, he has sent Vice President J.D. Vance there on more than one occasion, most recently when he appeared there to berate me and my White House press corps colleagues over our coverage of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting of Minneapolis resident Renee Goode.

One would think that the Vice President of the United States would have better things to do than yell at a bunch of reporters because he doesn’t like the headlines on a story, but here we are.

And Leavitt hasn’t been shy about issuing over-the-top rebuttals when she’s besieged with legitimate questions she won’t answer. A few days ago, he put on one of my colleagues the mountain – a friendly gentleman who is originally from Northern Ireland – had the temerity to offer a contrary opinion when asked what he thought of last week’s shooting.

She responded by taking umbrage at his honest answer and slamming him as a “biased reporter with left-wing views” and a “left-wing hack” who “pretends you’re a journalist”.

It’s a tactic that Trump himself has used on numerous occasions — often with female or non-white reporters — when he asks tough questions about subjects he prefers to avoid.

Still, the dirty little secret about Trump — then and now — is that he actually likes reporters. The one thing he missed most about the presidency wasn’t the planes or other similar perks of the most powerful job in the world, it was the “pool” of reporters he could call on whenever he wanted to talk about anything.

For all his talk about “fake news,” he spent years calling reporters and is still taking calls on their cell phones (and if you’re reading this, Mr. President, you can always ask Carolyn for my number).

What’s different — and cooler — this time around is that Trump now surrounds himself with people who actually believe in the anti-press rhetoric he’s spent years publicly friendly to in private.

Trump may sometimes call me and my colleagues “enemies of the people,” but Vice President J.D. Vance, Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi and others really believe it.