TOWOIT #310: Not a news conference

March 23, 2018

There wasn’t a White House daily briefing yesterday, but Mick Mulvaney snuck in and talked about the spending bill for 15 minutes with reporters. When asked if the president would sign it, he replied VERY confidently, that YES, he would! He did the Mulvaney thing where he goes, “Why, you ask?” and then he said because it funds the president’s priorities!

Then the next morning President Genius went on Twitter and said he was thinking about vetoing the spending bill.

Mind you, it’s down to the wire to avoid a government shut down.

There’s nothing on the C-span schedule for most of the morning about a White House Daily Briefing with Sarah Sanders, but then one pops up for a briefing at 1:00 and reporters scramble to be there.


Then suddenly, it wasn’t with Sarah Sanders it was with Donald Trump and it was about the omnibus bill. The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman put her two cents in.

Tweet saying that the President will give a press availability at 1 pm

C-span still said it would be a daily briefing with Sarah Sanders, but they put up a photo of Donald Trump. On the White House You Tube channel, it said that Trump would give a press conference on the omnibus bill.

People got excited.



Then it became clear that it wasn’t going to be in the briefing room. Except nothing was really made clear. Trey Yingst made smoldering eye contact with Eamon Javers across the crowded briefing room.


No briefing after all, no conference. No veto. No questions.


People accused Sarah Sanders of participating in a charade on getting away with only having one daily briefing in an incredibly eventful week, while tricking people into thinking that canceling a Friday briefing was an unavoidable misfortune.






The White House you tube video window went all “broken link!” and then the title suddenly changed and from “President Trump gives a news conference to discuss the omnibus bill” to “President Trump Participates in a Bill Signing.” Participates!

So the ones that were allowed into the diplomatic room to hear Trump ramble went in there to wait to hear Trump ramble.


Alexandra Petri wasn’t there, she’s just funny.

Various news outlets on Twitter and You Tube were still heralding an imminent “news conference” with Trump, several minutes after the reporters had been tweeting that that wasn’t what it was.

C-span kept scooching back the start time in five-minute increments as if they really didn’t know what was happening.

People kept piling into the White House You Tube channel to watch. Twenty-six minutes after the “press availability” was scheduled to start, Trump wandered in and commenced rambling.

He read through a laundry list of cool military stuff, and implied that stealth planes are actually invisible, which he has done before.

He said stuff like, we got “one hundred percent of our land back from ISIS” (what?)

And also stuff like “the tanker aircraft is very important, based on everything.”

After 18 minutes, he thanked everyone and left the podium, definitely not planning to ask a single question. He responded off mic to one guy who yelled a question and then he left.


Once again, he forgot to sign the bill.


The funny thing to me was that viewers piled into the White House You Tube channel, and the viewership climbed and climbed… until a couple minutes after Trump started talking, and then people just started BAILING out of the live stream.

There’s a standard pattern with Sarah Huckabee Sanders (or Raj Shah). The viewership slowly builds as people wait for the briefing to start (actual start marked as “B”) and then the curve gets steeper and veers up when the briefing actually starts, then gently approaches an asymptote and gets more flat until the end of the briefing. But it never TANKS while the event is still happening!. I imagined all the people being like “Screw this guy. This isn’t a news conference!”

I liked that.

A graph with a bunch of lines showing viewership across minutes on the White House you tube channel.

People REALLY got worked up beforehand. The briefing started just after the line surpassed 20,000 viewers.

And that’s the end of my story.

Back to our regularly scheduled shit show, folks.

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