President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before boarding Marine One on Wednesday. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo white house Trump’s ‘chopper talk’ puts media on the defensive Using Marine One as a backdrop, the White House has replaced formal briefings with impromptu chats where the president sets all the rules.

It was another bravura performance of “Chopper Talk.”

The latest iteration of President Donald Trump’s signature news conferences in front of a thwapping Marine One on Wednesday was a whirligig of boastfulness, slingshot attacks and public self-therapy — in other words, vintage Trump.


As reporters shouted dozens of questions above the din of the helicopter’s churning engines, Trump picked the ones he wanted — on Greenland, Russia, the Fed and background checks for gun sales — and brushed past those he didn’t.

Wednesday’s careening, impromptu 35-minute news conference may have looked bizarre to veteran observers of the White House, not to mention maddening to television pros accustomed to high-quality audio and video production values. But there’s a method to the seeming madness.

The “Chopper Talk” sessions, as comedian Stephen Colbert has dubbed them, serve multiple goals for Trump, reporters and White House insiders say. They allow him to speak more often in front of the cameras than his predecessors, yet firmly on his own terms. He scans the pack of reporters, seizing on questions he wants, while ignoring others. He makes headline-ready pronouncements and airs grievances for anywhere from a few minutes to a half-hour — and then walks away when he’s had enough.

Trump’s freewheeling Q&As have essentially replaced the formal White House press briefing, which hasn’t been held in more than five months. The traditional on-camera briefings, which were held regularly under press secretary Sean Spicer, became shorter and less frequent under Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and have been nonexistent under Stephanie Grisham, who took the reins in June.

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Reporters say the shift from a formal process — in which the president or his press secretary call on reporters one-by-one, without knowing what will be asked, and where follow-up questions are expected — diminishes their ability to hold him accountable.

“If he was at a podium, we would be pressing him after he answers the question, we would be correcting him, we would be pointing out discrepancies in previous answers, and we’re not able to do that in the chaotic setting of a departure,” said CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang. “Many times I’ve tried to ask a follow-up question, but he’s already pointed to somebody else.”

Which is not to say the Marine One gaggles don’t make news. Trump has often used them to announce major developments, such as the departures of chief of staff John Kelly and Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta. He told reporters earlier this month how he received a “very beautiful” letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, though he declined to reveal the contents amid shouted questions. He’s even recently fueled conspiracy theories surrounding voter fraud and Jeffrey Epstein’s death.

Grisham said last week that Trump is “so accessible” that she doesn’t “know what any of the press could complain about.”

“President Trump communicates directly with the American people more than any President in history,” she said, when asked by POLITICO about Trump’s preference for Marine One pressers. “The fact that the White House press corps can no longer grandstand on TV is of no concern to us.”

In interviews with POLITICO, several White House reporters acknowledged that they are pleased with the near-daily access to the president but echoed Jiang’s complaint that the chaotic format doesn’t allow for substantive questions or follow-ups.

“They are actually a perfect encapsulation of him: quick hit questions, quick hit answers, lots of give and take,” said one White House reporter. “But they are terrible for reporters. It is impossible to hear, have a substantive dialogue, ask a follow-up question or do any serious pressing of the president. It is a fucking circus.”

Veteran New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker suggested Trump benefits from the on-camera frenzy. “There’s no question that it works to his advantage that we look unruly and disorderly,” he said. “It’s not like standing at a podium in the East Room or the briefing room, where you can have a civilized calling on people who raise their hands.”

Former President Barack Obama more often used formal news conferences — he did 24 solo ones to Trump’s eight in the first 30 months in office — and his administration conducted daily news briefings. Meanwhile, Trump has become his own de facto communications chief, setting policy and sparking controversies via Twitter and shifting the action from the staid briefing room to a roaring helicopter waiting on the South Lawn.

Reporters watch as Marine One flies off with President Donald Trump on Wednesday. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Trump has stopped 80 times for question-and-answer sessions in departing or returning to the White House aboard Marine One or on the tarmac before getting on or off Air Force One, according to CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller, who keeps detailed records of the presidency. Knoller said he found only three occasions in which Obama stopped for such press availabilities in his eight-year tenure. And when Obama spoke to reporters in transit, he tended to use a podium, adding a dash of formality to the press scrum.

“There are times when Trump’s hair is blowing in the wind or his tie is blowing in the wind. He’s shouting,” said a former senior Obama White House official. “It’s just not conducive to the kind of presidential look that we often strove for.”

Yet Trump seems to relish the outside sessions, which have aired extensively on cable networks or snippets in news coverage throughout the day. Baker said he believes Trump prefers the natural light to the artificial lighting inside the White House. “He thinks that’s a better look,” he said, “and remember, he’s a TV guy, so he’s thinking about it in terms of how the television image is.”

A former senior Trump White House official said Trump “likes settings where the pace to a greater extent, the length of these engagements, is a little bit up in the air.”

At times, the former senior official said, White House aides discussed whether to urge Trump to not do Marine One Q&As on specific days, to draw less attention to news that was not helpful to the president.

“Sometimes there was a topic which would go away if he doesn’t engage, but it could blow up if he does,” recalled the former senior official.

There is also more attention to details than the seemingly casual encounters suggest. If Trump is departing on Marine One in the late morning, “he always comes out of the Oval Office, even if he hasn’t been to the Oval Office, because it makes him look like he’s been working all day,” said a second White House reporter.

Trump’s love of the Marine One sessions has even become fodder for late-night and popular podcast hosts. CBS’ Stephen Colbert referred to Trump’s appearances as “chopper talk” in a CNN interview last week. Colbert said Trump might as well stand in front of “a margarita maker because it’s just the same noise.”

“You basically have a jet airplane parked on the South Lawn,” said former Obama White House official Tommy Vietor in describing the “genius” of Trump’s Marine One pressers on a recent episode of “Pod Save the World.”

“You can’t hear the questions — he ignores anything that he doesn’t like,” said Vietor. “He just literally screams idiotic things like ‘I know nothing about Russia’ to this gaggle of the press. And there’s nothing they can do about it.”

The frequent “chopper talk” is one of the reasons Trump has surpassed his five predecessors — Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan — in fielding questions from reporters during their first 30 months in office, according to the White House Transition Project. Those five presidents took questions at approximately one third of their public speaking events, while Trump does so at more than half of his.

The project’s director, Martha Joynt Kumar, said Trump also differs from his predecessors in that he rarely does policy speeches, and doesn’t hold evening news conferences in the East Room.

Even though Reagan took questions outside Marine One — amid speculation that he, too, benefited from the atmospherics of reporters shouting and looking unkempt — Kumar said Reagan would prepare at length with aides to respond to questions in formal settings, along with the administration providing daily briefings for reporters to go deeper into policy decisions.

“The presidency is more than just the president himself and what he’s thinking, but what is happening,” said Kumar, who stressed how news briefings traditionally gave the public a better understanding of the administration’s policies and how they were crafted.

The helicopter presser is a very different setting. In trying to engage Trump, Baker said, questions need to be “straightforward, simple and to the point.”

“You can’t ask a question that has a predicate or a kind of complex construction because you’re shouting with all the other reporters like ‘Mr. President, what about Iran?’ or ‘Mr. President, they say you’re a racist,’” Baker said.

And the loud noise of the rotor blades whirring in the background gives Trump a convenient excuse to respond to a question as he interprets it, instead of directly answering the question as it was phrased. Pacing from one end of the group to the other, Trump looks for familiar faces to call on and seizes on topics that he’s particularly energized about or aggravated by.

During Q&As last week, Trump ripped Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar (“very anti-Jewish,” “very anti-Israel”), CNN host Chris Cuomo (“a total out of control animal” who “spews lies every night”), and ex-White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci (“very much out of control” and a “nervous neurotic wreck”).

He pivoted off a question Sunday about an unfavorable Fox News poll to riff on commentators he doesn’t like (Juan Williams) and those he does (Sean Hannity), and to muse that there’s “something going on at Fox.” The president also suggested he “calls the shots” for the general election debates, which are overseen by a bipartisan commission, and didn’t respond to a direct question about whether he’d participate in them.

“He’ll just hear a word that catches his attention like ‘racism’ or ‘the squad’ or whatever the topic is, and he’ll just deliver what he’s probably already been tweeting about and what he already firmly believes so that can be difficult,” said Jiang.

Reporters also inquire about Trump’s Twitter activity, such as his sharing a tweet suggesting the Clintons were involved in the death of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who was facing sex-trafficking charges.

“The retweet, which is what it was, just a retweet, was from somebody who is a very respected conservative pundit,” Trump told reporters in defending himself last week. Trump later said he had “no idea” whether the Clintons were involved in Epstein’s death, though used the gathering of reporters to offer a journalistic assignment.

“Did Bill Clinton go to the island?” Trump asked. “Epstein had an island that was not a good place as I understand it, and I was never there. So you have to ask, did Bill Clinton go to the island? That’s the question. If you find that out, you’re going to know a lot.”

Two days later, the president pushed a baseless claim that he lost New Hampshire in the 2016 election because “thousands of thousands of people” came into the state to vote from “locations unknown.” Trump claimed to know the “unknown” location, but when a reporter asked where he was referring to, he just ignored the question.

Trump has changed how the press covers other facets of the White House, including Cabinet meetings. In the past, there would typically be a short “pool spray,” in which a small pool of reporters and photographers cover the beginning of a meeting, getting a few images and perhaps asking a quick question or two before the doors closed. Trump, at times, has turned Cabinet meetings into quasi-news conferences with the cameras rolling.

Similarly, Trump’s arrivals and departures are now a priority for news organizations and reporters flock to them. Jiang said there can be “a lot of gymnastics” for correspondents trying to get close enough to the president. “I’ve ducked under tripods,” she said. “I’ve climbed under equipment because I’m trying to get as close to that line as possible.”

Unlike the briefing room, with its assigned seats, the makeshift news conferences have led to tensions on the White House grounds, especially when pool reporters responsible for providing information to the press corps as a whole found themselves out of earshot to cover the news.

Doug Mills, a veteran New York Times photographer and board member of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said he now has “a second job” trying to better facilitate access in this unusual media environment.

“This was a situation that certainly has come of age with Trump,” said Mills, who has covered the White House since the Reagan years. “Most presidents do not hold news conferences going and coming from the helicopter.”

Mills said there are now “guidelines,” not rules, for how journalists should congregate as Trump arrives and departs. They enter in groups, as at the airport, with the radio pool reporter followed by inhouse White House pool. Next come the correspondents, with a fourth group including additional still photographers.

Such conventions became necessary as this unconventional news conference became routine. “Your jaw drops when he walks past and just waves,” Mills said. “Everyone stands there, ‘He’s not going to talk?’”



CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the number of impromptu press conferences the president has held before boarding Marine One or Air Force One.