President-elect
Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he would hold a "general news
conference" on Jan. 11, his first formal press conference since his
November election
victory.
I will be having a general news conference on JANUARY ELEVENTH in N.Y.C.
Thank you.
— Donald J. Trump
(@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2017
Trump had been
scheduled to hold a press conference on Dec. 15 to discuss his plan to leave
his sprawling business empire as he takes office Jan. 20, but that event was
postponed.
Since taking office,
Trump has sat for a few television interviews and has taken a handful of
shouted questions from the press pool — a small group of reporters who follow
the president — both at Trump Tower in New York and outside his coastal Florida
estate.
Trump's last
full-fledged news conference was July 27, which he held at his Miami-area golf
course as counterprogramming to the ongoing Democratic National
Convention. It was there that Trump called upon Russia to hack his
opponent Hillary Clinton's emails saying, "I will tell you this, Russia:
If you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are
missing."
His staff later
insisted that Trump was joking.
In lieu of press
conferences, the president-elect has communicated to the American public
through tweets, as well as a series of December "Thank You" rallies
in states that helped provide his winning margin in the Electoral
College.
Trump's team has
downplayed the need for news conferences. White House counselor Kellyanne
Conway, said last month that the press would have access to the president.
"This will be a
traditional White House in the sense that you will have a great deal of press
availability on a daily basis and you'll have a president who continues to be
engaged with the press," she said in an interview with ABC.
While Trump's lack
of press interaction is a worry to some, many of his supporters cheered the
celebrity businessman's battles with what they felt were biased reporters.
Trump made his antagonistic relationship with the media a centerpiece of his
campaign, inciting his rally crowds to boo the press, singling out individual
reporters with derogatory names like "sleazebag" and using Twitter to
attack coverage he didn't like.
His predecessors
took a different approach.
Two days after the
Supreme Court decision gave him the 2000 election, George W. Bush held a press
conference where reporters asked him about his Cabinet picks and tax plans. He
proceeded to field more questions each of the next two days. Barack Obama, also
regularly held news conferences after winning, taking questions from the White
House press corps 18 different times as president-elect. Bush, who had a
shorter transition due to the extended Florida recount, did so 11 times.
The Associated Press
contributed to this report.
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