MEDIA/SUMMIT/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “There’s extra trouble brewing between Donald Trump and the press and, as usual, it’s of the president’s making. As you’ve probably read, the White House barred reporters from Reuters, The Associated Press, Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times from covering Trump’s dinner with Kim Jong Un on Wednesday [2-27-19] at the Hanoi summit. Their exclusion was White House retaliation for episodes earlier in the day when Reuters and AP scribes shouted questions at Trump at the ‘pool sprays’ convened for reporters and photographers to record his meeting with the North Korean leader. By conventional pool-spray standards, there was nothing untoward about the shouted questions. Ordinarily, Trump relishes the shoot-out pyrotechnics of spray interviews, as NPR reported two months into Trump’s administration. For Trump, a spray is the next best thing to a campaign rally, allowing him to convert the dullness of a photo op—shaking hands, signing a bill, meeting a dignitary or walking out of the White House to board Marine One—into a multimedia celebration that can play all day on the cable news networks. It’s almost as good.”
–Jack Shafer, “Trump’s One Summit Win Was Over the Media,” Politico, February 28, 2019