Jonathan D. Salant photo
Journalists who don't have seats jam into the aisle in the White House briefing room Wednesday.
WASHINGTON — For decades, a reporter for The Associated Press would have first dibs to question the White House press secretary during the daily news briefing.
But Wednesday, the AP, already persona non grata in the Trump White House for refusing to follow the president’s lead and change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, didn’t get a chance to ask anything. Karoline Leavitt, President Donald Trump’s press secretary, didn’t call on the AP reporter.
Instead, the question went to Merit TV, a year-old outlet owned by Phil McGraw, the “Dr. Phil” of conventional television fame who spoke last fall at Trump’s controversial Madison Square Garden rally and has supported his immigration policies. It is one of the new media outlets the Trump White House has invited to join the conventional news outlets in the briefing room.
I am part of the briefing room rotation, so I got to see all this up close for the first time since Trump returned to the White House. I was one of the lucky ones — I had a seat rather than having to jam into the aisles with other reporters and photographers who shouted out and raised their hands as they jockeyed for Leavitt’s attention from that vantage point.
White House press briefings almost disappeared during Trump’s first term – one of his press secretaries, Stephanie Grisham, never held any during her nine months in the job — but resumed under President Joe Biden and continued in the second Trump administration.
What also resumed was the contentiousness between the administration and the press corps. Even before taking questions, Leavitt scolded the reporters for focusing on what she called a “sensationalized story from the failing Atlantic magazine that is falling apart by the hour.”
The story was that the Atlantic’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a conversation among top Trump administration officials discussing the forthcoming attack on Iran-funded Houthi militants in Yemen.
The conversation took place on an unclassified messaging platform, and the focus of the coverage has been whether this was a major breach of national security.
Leavitt insisted that “no classified material was sent on the messaging thread” and said that “if this story proves anything, it proves that Democrats and their propagandists in the mainstream media know how to fabricate, orchestrate and disseminate a misinformation campaign quite well” before attacking the story’s author, Jeffrey Goldberg.
She also attacked Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, for his “stupid mistake” in removing the Houthis from the U.S. terrorist list, and praised Trump for taking military action against the group.
But Leavitt’s admonishments didn’t dampen the ardor of the reporters in the room to keep questioning her about the incident.
Even Leavitt’s choice to ask the first question, Merit News co-anchor Lyndsey Keith, initially asked about the security incident before asking how Trump’s proposed tariffs will help the American people.
Leavitt thanked Keith for the economic question and said that the tariffs will ensure that the U.S. “will no longer be ripped off by nations around the world.”
That was just one of two questions (out of 17) that didn’t focus on the story of the day.
The other one came from one of the standees who yelled loud enough to get Leavitt’s attention. She began by thanking Trump for Tuesday’s executive order on elections and voting. She falsely claimed, “So many journalists for four years were banned from talking about this very subject.”
“This is an effort to restore trust in American elections,” Leavitt responded.
But Trump and the Republicans are the ones questioning election integrity, against all evidence to the contrary.
Trump has continued to claim without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen and that millions of people voted illegally in 2016, depriving him of a popular vote victory. In addition, studies have shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare. Nationally, the Brennan Center found 30 possible votes by noncitizens out of 23.5 million votes overseen by election officials in 2016.
And David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research said last December on X: “In 2020 and in 2024, our nation’s elections officials ran the most secure, transparent, and verified presidential elections in US history, and their work has withstood more scrutiny than any elections in world history.”
Leavitt abruptly cut off the briefing after 16 minutes of questions as Vice President JD Vance was scheduled to speak at another event and Trump was going to hold a press conference later in the day on those tariffs.
Watch Wednesday’s briefing in full below.
A view of the room.