The People Have a Right to Know What Their President Is Doing
President Donald Trump will sit down with Fox News TV personality Ainsley Earhardt on Thursday for an interview that will air on “Fox & Friends” Friday morning. It will be 40 days (41 counting Friday) since Trump’s last interview, which was also with a Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro. And two days earlier, Trump gave an interview to NBC News’ Lester Holt, during which he admitted he fired Jim Comey over the Russia investigation.
Trump also granted an interview to Earhardt (photo) three days before he was elected.
Why does all this matter?
Because by all accounts, including this president, he is under investigation, he and several top members of his administration have lawyered up, and as the Washington Post reported this week, in the age of Trump the peoples’ business increasingly “is happening behind closed doors.”
The Senate bill to scale back the health-care law known as Obamacare is being written in secret by a single senator, Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and a clutch of his senior aides.
Officials at numerous agencies of the Trump administration have stonewalled friendly Republicans in Congress — not to mention Democrats — by declining to share internal documents on sensitive matters or refusing to answer questions.
President Trump, meanwhile, is still forbidding the release of his tax returns, his aides have stopped releasing logs of visitors to the White House and his media aides have started banning cameras at otherwise routine news briefings, as happened Monday.
Trump even refuses to acknowledge to the public that he plays golf during his frequent weekend visits to his private golf courses.
And yet, just this morning Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, not denying her boss Sean Spicer is getting promoted, actually had the gall to claim, “we have one of the most accessible press teams any administration has ever had.”
Huckabee-Sanders’ claim on accessibility does not negate the fact that basic, common questions never, ever get answered. Accessibility means nothing when the White House refuses to answer questions.
For example, ABC News put together this short clip and a list of 25 times Sean Spicer just couldn’t answer a basic question:
“In a break with his predecessors,” The Hill notes, “Trump did not hold a news conference during his first foreign trip last month. His only solo news conference as president happened in February.”
To comment on this article and other NCRM content, visit our Facebook page.