Donald Trump couldn’t help himself. “We will take a few questions,” the president-elect told reporters assembled at Mar-a-Lago for an announcement about a $100 billion investment from the Japanese technology company SoftBank. He answered nearly two dozen questions in an hour.
What was billed as a press statement became a sweeping press conference, his first since winning the election, signaling the return of Trump’s brand of free-wheeling transparency.
His staff had summoned reporters to talk up the new investment, but Trump happily fielded questions on everything from the border wall (the sale of unused material was “almost a criminal act”) to the alleged link between autism and vaccines (“there is something wrong and we are going to find out about it”). Five weeks before Inauguration Day, all three of the major cable networks took Trump live.
And the president-elect made news off-the-cuff.
Trump said of the drones sighted on the East Coast, “The government knows what is happening,” contradicting claims from the Biden administration and condemning them for not commenting on their origin. He added that drones had been spotted over his Bedminster estate in New Jersey, and “I decided to cancel my trip.”
He said he would consider pardoning New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who was federally indicted for accepting thousands of dollars’ worth of travel upgrades from Turkish officials. “Being upgraded in an airplane many years ago,” said the former, now future, president who flies private, “I know probably everybody here has been upgraded.”
Trump said that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was doing “a good job” but declined to push his former rival to appoint his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to the seat that will soon be vacated by his secretary of state nominee, Sen. Marco Rubio. “That’s his choice,” he explained in a notable display of public restraint. “Nothing to do with me.”
The lengthy exchanges were a return to form for Trump. He has often directed his ire toward “the fake news,” and Monday was no different. “We have to straighten out the press,” he said. “The press is very corrupt. Almost as corrupt as our elections.” But the president-elect took questions regardless.
For an hour, just like for much of his first four years in office, there was no mystery about exactly what he was thinking.
Trump described clashes with reporters during the campaign as if they were a feat of cognitive strength. While he loved the camera, Vice President Harris largely avoided meeting the press. This, he claimed over the summer, was proof that “she’s not smart enough to do a news conference.” Ahead of a second term, then, it would be hypocritical and out of character to suddenly avoid the limelight.
Around the same time that Trump was fielding questions in Florida, President Biden was making prepared remarks at the Department of Labor. He read from a teleprompter and did not take questions afterward. Other than announcing a monument to Frances Perkins, FDR’s labor secretary and the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet, he made no news.
Biden has held few press conferences. Even as his numbers in the polls diminished and Democrats worried that the White House had a “messaging problem,” the current president avoided Q&A. According to analysis by the American Presidency Project, Biden has held fewer press conferences than any president since Ronald Reagan. His last formal press conference followed the NATO summit in July. Dogged by questions about his mental acuity, he withdrew from the presidential election that month.
For his part Monday, Trump made plenty of claims and opened himself up to as much scrutiny in the process. His hinting about the connection between vaccines and autism, for instance, has been debunked by numerous scientific studies. Similarly, his boast that Elon Musk could cut nearly $2 trillion from the federal budget in waste without touching entitlements, the New York Times reported, would essentially amount to cutting all discretionary spending.
This is nothing new from Trump. He courted controversy and occupied the spotlight while in office each time he paused to take questions from reporters or fired off a late-night tweet on the social media website now called X. “If you can hear straight from [the president’s] mouth,” said former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, “you don’t need another spokesman.”
Trump will soon return to the White House. His increased accessibility comes at a moment of remarkably diminished trust in institutions overall. Just 22% of Americans expressed trust in the federal government, per Pew Research, while less than 31% of the public reported a “fair amount” of confidence in the press, according to an October survey conducted by Gallup.
