Late Tuesday, New York Times White House reporter Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan shared that “a growing number of people around” President Trump “favor” his years-long desire “to move reporters out of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room” to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) next door.
Haberman and Swan note that it “would effectively remove news organizations from the White House,” which the President has repeatedly proposed to aides, including “in late August, during one of Karoline Leavitt’s final meetings with President Trump in the Oval Office.”
In its place, they said “Trump has told aides he would prefer to bring back the indoor pool President Franklin D. Roosevelt added in 1933” until President Richard Nixon (of all Presidents) did away with it to create the press area.
Haberman and Swan supposedly penned a news story, but it read like a news column, with passages such as this one:
While moving the media out of the White House may be a relatively small debate considering Mr. Trump’s attacks on journalists more broadly, it would be highly symbolic. The proximity of the media to the seat of U.S. executive power has long been an acknowledgment of the importance of a free press in a constitutional democracy.
It would also be a decision that would be difficult to undo by future presidents.
Mr. Trump has brought up the press-eviction idea before, dating to his first term, and he has never quite dropped it. A growing number of people around him favor the idea. Several close to him believe that moving the news media, most likely to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street, may be the latest escalation in a remarkable series of moves against the news media that have already gone further than most of them expected.
Notably, the EEOB has an auditorium, which housed a number of Trump events, and many of the Biden regime’s heavily choreographed charades to make the President in cognitive decline feel capable of conducting important business.
In other words (and perhaps the best news for this space), the good news is there would still be a way for there to be press briefings.
Despite a statement denying this from the White House press shop, the two went on to share that, in past conversations when Trump said it needed to happen, “most of Mr. Trump’s senior aides agreed it served him better to keep the media nearby. But Mr. Trump has grown more enraged about his press coverage, and other advisers of growing influence have encouraged him to take drastic measures to punish journalists.”
The one argument against moving the press is it could backfire:
Most of Mr. Trump’s advisers thought it was better to leave the news media inside the White House. They knew Mr. Trump liked to call the cameras into the Oval Office at a moment’s notice. And several of his more seasoned advisers suspected that if they followed his direction to evict the press — and his coverage got worse — Mr. Trump would blame them for the inevitable results of his own idea.
The rest was a slanted history lesson of sorts about Trump’s legal battles with the press, huffing he did so “emboldened by his victory” in 2024, with lawsuits “intended...to have a chilling effect on negative coverage.”
