By Lorraine Ali
Los Angeles Times
President Obama’s farewell speech, and Donald Trump’s first official press conference since becoming president-elect, took place less than 14 hours apart.
But in that brief period between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, 70 years’ worth of presidential decorum dating to the first televised address from the White House by Harry Truman was thrown out and replaced by a contentious spectacle more akin to reality TV than the Oval Office.
From the lobby of Trump Tower, the president-elect described himself as the “greatest jobs producer that God ever created,” referred to the recently leaked dossier that, among other things, alleged Trump coordinated with Russian intelligence in the hacking of Democrats’ emails, as “crap” put together by “sick” people. He told CNN’s Jim Acosta, “Your organization is terrible, and I am not going to give you a question. You are fake news.”
He even brought props. “These papers are all just a piece of the many, many companies that are being put into trust to be run by my two sons,” he said, referencing the contents of the manila folders stacked on a table next to the podium. “I hope at the end of eight years I’ll come back and I’ll say, ‘Oh, you did a good job.’ Otherwise, if they do a bad job, I’ll say, you’re fired.”
It was a show more than a press conference, a sneak peek of what the next four years might look like: a cross between “West Wing,” “Veep,” the Simpsons and “The Apprentice.” Whether you found that terrifying or amusing depends on your political leanings and your appetite for extreme entertainment.
The losing contestants in Wednesday’s episode were civility and temperance — both hallmarks of U.S. presidential press conferences, both part of a conciliatory dynamic that’s set us apart from most every other country in the world.
The event, Trump’s first press conference since July, made outlandish video clips and memes that used to seem so foreign — British Parliament members shouting each other down during sessions, Japanese politicians literally brawling on camera over policy — suddenly appear more familiar than funny.
And if Wednesday was any indication, the formal conduct we’ve come to expect from our heads of state is one of the first casualties associated with Trump’s promise to change the ways things are done in Washington. That, and apparently, speech preparation.
In the opening moments of the conference — the part where generations of U.S. presidents have delivered prepared remarks or talking points before taking questions from the press pool in front of them — our next commander-in-chief appeared to wing it. If audiences worried that President-elect Trump would be duller than candidate Trump, fear no more. The scene had elements of improv theater, mixed martial arts and a celebrity roast (“How about that Lindsey Graham!”)
He spoke of polls getting the election wrong, the “beautiful scene of Nov. 8,” the “great talent, tremendous talent” of the military bands who will perform at his inauguration, his victorious wooing of Alibaba’s Jack Ma, and, again, how he’ll be the “greatest jobs producer that God ever created.”
Compared with Obama’s carefully constructed farewell speech the previous evening, it felt like a programming change so radical it may as well have been in another language, and with subtitles.
“I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents,” said the outgoing president from Chicago’s McCormick Hall on Tuesday. “That idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaffirmed by those who planted flags from foreign battlefields to the surface of the moon; a creed at the core of every American whose story is not yet written: Yes We Can.”
To be fair, press conferences are never the choreographed affairs of a sweeping speech to a hall full of supporters. But even when an embattled Richard Nixon resigned on live television in 1974 after one of the biggest White House scandals in U.S. history, he did so with less bluster and drama than Trump displayed on Wednesday.
Trump repeatedly used words such as “disgraceful” and “disastrous” to characterize everything from the state of the union, to health care, to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and said he’d been treated more unfairly than any other incoming president. Then when a reporter asked if he was going to release his tax documents, and Trump said no, the reporter pointed out that every president since the 1970s has done so.
Trump interrupted: “Gee, I’ve never heard that. I’ve never heard that before. You know, the only one that cares about my tax returns are the reporters, OK?”
Reporter: “You don’t think the American public is concerned about that?”
Trump: “No, I don’t think so. I won. I mean, I became president. No, I don’t think they care at all.”
Judge Judy couldn’t have been more dismissive.
It was a far cry from the first live televised press conference by a U.S. president, when John F. Kennedy covered a wide variety of pressing topics with reporters, including nuclear weapon issues with the Soviet Union, U.S. relations with Cuba and voting rights.
And he didn’t use the word “crap.”
Lorraine Ali is a senior writer with the Los Angeles Times.
