Donald Trump on Wednesday will step out from the relative safety of his Android Twitter keyboard to spar with the “dishonest media” he so often relishes disparaging.

The long-awaited first news conference since Trump became president-elect took on added consequence Tuesday evening amid explosive new reports that U.S. officials are looking into allegations that Russia may have gathered compromising material on Trump.


Trump slashed at those reports in all-caps on Twitter — “FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” — but now he will have to answer them in detail, all but ensuring a tense scene will unfold Wednesday in Trump Tower.

Trump has resisted holding a wide-ranging news conference since his election, postponing the first one he set mid-December to explain how he will untangle himself from ethical and financial conflicts of his business empire. Instead, he’s mostly taken to Twitter to communicate his will and his wishes — at times sending shockwaves across the financial markets and Capitol Hill.

The delay has represented a break from 40 years of precedent — in which presidents and presidents-elect of both parties have held news conferences within 10 days of the election — and is another sign that Trump plans to bend the norms of the White House and push the boundaries of the president’s relationship with the press.

“They won’t be holding press conferences according to a timeline set by a clock that was last wound before Ronald Reagan,” former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo said.

It has been 24 weeks since Trump held his last news conference on July 27, which he opened by saying, “I put myself through your news conferences often, not that it’s fun.”

A lot has changed since.

Then, Trump was seen as a political longshot. Now, he is less than 10 days from taking the oath of office.

Then, Trump encouraged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s private email server (“Russia: If you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press”). Now, he will be asked to answer for the Russian-directed hacking that apparently did occur in 2016 and the reports that a classified presentation given to Trump last week included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information on the president-elect. And that there was an exchange of information between Trump’s surrogates and the Russian government during the campaign.

“It’s just another attempt to malign Mr. Trump and I find it interesting how they released this information one day prior to Mr. Trump’s press conference,” said longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen.

Trump’s post-election news conference, at least when it was first announced in December, was slated to focus on his attempt to unwind the complex web of conflicts inherent in a billionaire businessman with dealings across the globe stepping into the White House.

Trump had previously announced, on Twitter, that he would “be leaving my businesses before January 20th” and that his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. “will manage them” and that “No new deals will be done during my term(s) in office.” But few other specifics have been provided.

In some ways, Trump is burying his own news conference amid the most hectic week of the transition. The Senate is slated to hold multiple simultaneous confirmation hearings on Wednesday, including two of the most contentious, Rex Tillerson for secretary of state and Jeff Sessions for attorney general. And with more than five months since Trump’s last news conference, the number of pent-up and unanswered questions are plentiful, extending far beyond his business dealings, including his demand that the repeal of Obamacare coincide with its replacement, his remaining open Cabinet spots and new developments in foreign affairs.

“He wants to overwhelm the news cycle,” said Rick Tyler, who served as communications director on Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign and experienced many news cycles overwhelmed by Trump during the primary.

Trump romped through the Republican primaries on an all-you-can-speak media diet but he has been far more limited in his media appearances in recent months. While he has granted post-election interviews to mainstream outlets, such as 60 Minutes and the New York Times, gone are the days of him calling regularly into the cable morning shows on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC to set the day’s storyline.

Trump’s advisers say he has proven as successful in setting the news and political agenda as president-elect by simply tapping out a 140-character tweet.

“I do look there first, because that’s what’s going to drive the news,” incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer said last week of checking Twitter as soon as he wakes up in the morning. “I mean, whatever he tweets is going to drive the news.”

Spicer called it a “misconception” during an event at the University of Chicago that Trump is “just randomly tweeting.”

“He knows exactly where he wants to end up on a particular subject,” Spicer said.

Caputo, who left the Trump campaign over the summer, called Twitter “a low-risk strategy he’s going to use every day” until it stops proving effective.

“If he’s going to need to turn it up a notch, he could turn to those morning show relationships immediately,” Caputo said. “The moment he finds out he needs a little extra oomph to get a policy passed or an issue resolved he could return to it.”

Spicer has said that Trump plans to give the president’s relationship with the media an overhaul — “business as usual is over,” Spicer told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in December — and has suggested he might change the daily, on-camera White House press briefings that have become custom.

“The thing that you’ve seen with Donald Trump is that he doesn’t, he doesn’t look to the past and say I’ve got to conform to these precedents,” Spicer told Hewitt.

Trump banned some outlets from attending his event during his presidential campaign, including POLITICO, because he did not like their coverage. Spicer has said that won’t happen at the White House.

Ahead of Wednesday’s news conference, Trump got in some warm-up with reporters earlier this week, coming down twice to the lobby of Trump Tower on Monday to take a handful of questions and calling the New York Times for an interview on Tuesday.

Trump’s long delay in holding a news conference represents an about-face for a candidate who tried to use Clinton’s aversion to press conferences to his benefit. His campaign issued daily alerts on “Hiding Hillary” over the summer. And Trump himself tweeted back in May that, “Crooked Hillary should be admonished for not having a press conference in 179 days.”

Trump’s drought falls less than two weeks short of that mark. His last news conference was 168 days ago.

