White House Keeps Vast Majority Of Trump Transcripts Secret | EUROtoday

WASHINGTON — If you’re excited by discovering Donald Trump’s exact phrases as he lied about his failed coup try in his Jan. 20 remarks on the U.S. Capitol quickly after his inaugural speech, good luck with that.

Same together with his Feb. 12 ideas within the Oval Office on how magnetism, in his view “a new theory,” doesn’t work on the plane provider Gerald Ford.

Or his statements within the Feb. 28 assembly with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, berating the Ukrainian president and empathizing with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin as a substitute.

Ditto together with his April 14 rationalization of how nicely he’s doing with “the cognitive” in comparison with earlier occupants of the White House.

The self-proclaimed “most transparent” White House in historical past, because it seems, has little curiosity in making the overwhelming majority of Trump’s speeches and interactions with journalists readily accessible to the general public whose taxes pay for his or her transcription, publishing simply 29 transcripts of the 146 public remarks Trump made in his first 100 days in workplace.

Trump’s White House posted transcripts for less than 11 of the 40 speeches during which Trump didn’t take questions from the media, and for less than one among his six formal information conferences, in response to a HuffPost evaluate. And of the 98 media “availabilities” during which Trump took questions from reporters informally — a observe that his aides level to as proof of his nice accessibility — solely 15 of the transcripts have been made public.

Previous White Houses, going again a long time, made all the transcripts compiled by the non-political stenography workplace, staffed by profession civil servants, obtainable in printed kind, through electronic mail and on the White House web site, as a matter in fact. Trump’s first-term workers additionally revealed all his remarks, apart from his speeches at rallies and fundraisers. Trump’s second-term White House stopped emailing transcripts to its press checklist simply 5 days after taking workplace, and of late has largely stopped posting them on the web site, too. As of Thursday morning, the final transcript from Trump on the location is from March 13.

Trump aides wouldn’t clarify their resolution to withhold 80% of the transcripts which have been ready. White House communications director Steven Cheung, nonetheless, did insult HuffPost for asking the query:

“You must be truly fucking stupid if you think we’re not transparent. The president regularly does multiple press engagements per day and they are streamed live on multiple platforms. We’ve even granted low-level outlets like HuffPo [sic] additional access to events, because we’re so transparent. For anyone to think otherwise proves they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Stop beclowning yourself,” he wrote, demanding that his assertion be revealed “in full.”

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center on the University of Pennsylvania, mentioned transcriptions of a president’s remarks have at all times been seen as historic data, not issues to be politicized. “Making the words of the president readily available is part of the accountability obligation of the White House,” she mentioned.

“The public has the right to know what the leader says … It’s a mark of a democratic system,” she added, saying that she couldn’t speculate as to why Trump is withholding most of his transcripts’ launch. “Trying to figure out why this White House does what it does requires a skill far beyond mine.”

While it’s true that movies of almost all of Trump’s public remarks can be found on C-SPAN, YouTube or different web sites, they aren’t simply searchable by subject or key phrase. There are personal corporations that transcribe his phrases, however they aren’t complete and never well-known to the general public.

Indeed, Trump critics say that growing the issue of discovering his precise phrases on any given subject is exactly the purpose of protecting a lot of the official transcripts a secret. After 10 years of listening to him, Trump’s outlandish claims and fixed lies have turn out to be mere background noise to many Americans, they argue, whereas really studying his statements hits otherwise.

“They know the transcripts will reveal, on paper, the word salad and incoherence that characterizes Trump,” mentioned Norman Ornstein, a political scientist with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “It is much easier to pore through written transcripts and compare them, which will show inconsistencies and reversals.”

Andrew Bates, a prime press aide within the Joe Biden White House, mentioned his counterparts within the Trump White House clearly perceive that studying what Trump has mentioned doesn’t replicate nicely on him. “He keeps saying things that are a liability, like talking about dolls and pencils. Or just getting confused,” Bates mentioned.

The Biden press workplace famously altered punctuation in a transcript to make it appear that Biden was criticizing a smaller subset of Trump supporters than the transcript initially steered. The Biden staff, nonetheless, launched that transcript and seems to have launched all these ready by the stenography workplace, totaling nicely over 2,000 over 4 years.

The Trump press store, in distinction, seems to have determined that one of the simplest ways to keep away from damaging media protection of his transcribed remarks is to not launch them within the first place. A comparability of the posted transcripts versus the remarks for which the transcripts have been withheld suggests an effort to hide Trump’s most outrageous, factually inaccurate or lie-filled statements.

On Inauguration Day, for instance, whereas the transcript for the official speech given instantly after Trump took the oath of workplace is accessible on the White House web site, a second one he gave to congressional Republicans quickly afterward shouldn’t be.

In that one, he once more pushed his oft-repeated lies about Jan. 6, 2021, the day he inspired a mob of his followers to march on the Capitol after which tried to make use of their assault on cops and different violence to stay in energy regardless of having misplaced the 2020 election. Trump bemoaned that his workers talked him out of together with that materials in his precise inaugural tackle.

“You can’t put things in there that you were going to put in, and I was going to talk about the J6 hostages, but you’ll be happy because you know it’s action, not words that count, and you’re going to see a lot of action on the J6 hostages, see a lot of action,” he mentioned in a 1,232-word part that repeatedly blamed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for all that occurred on Jan. 6. “And I was going to talk about the things that Joe [Biden] did today with the pardons of people that were very, very guilty of very bad crimes like the unselect committee of political thugs where they literally, I mean, what they did is they destroyed and deleted all of the information, all of the hearings. Practically not a thing left.”

Three weeks later, following a swearing-in ceremony for his director of nationwide intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, Trump provided nonsensical solutions to quite a lot of questions, together with one about waste and fraud within the federal authorities. Trump launched right into a 1,710-word rant on army contractors, together with the builders of the latest plane provider, the USS Gerald Ford, which makes use of a high-tech electromagnetic catapult system to launch airplanes to scale back stress on their airframes and touchdown gear.

“Take a look at the Gerald Ford, the aircraft carrier, the Ford. It came ― it was supposed to cost $3 billion; it ended up costing like $18 billion, and they make, of course, all electric catapults, which don’t work. And they have all magnetic elevators to lift up 25 planes at a time, 20 planes at a time,” he mentioned, not showing to know the rationale for the brand new designs. “And instead of using hydraulic, like on tractors, that can handle anything from hurricanes to lightning to anything, they used magnets. It’s a new theory, magnets are going to lift the planes up, and it doesn’t work.”

At the top of that month, Trump and Vice President JD Vance attacked Ukraine’s Zelenskyy for not being sufficiently grateful to the United States earlier than Trump turned to his acquainted protection of Putin, who continues to slaughter Ukrainian civilians to this present day by way of aerial assaults on residential areas.

“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt, where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. You ever hear of that deal?” Trump mentioned throughout a 206-word tangent once more recounting his grievances.

“That was a phony ― that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam, Hillary Clinton, Shifty Adam Schiff. It was a Democrat scam, and he had to go through that, and he did go through it, and we didn’t end up in a war, and he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bedroom, it was disgusting. And then they said, ‘Oh, oh, the laptop from hell was made by Russia,’ the 51 agents, the whole thing was a scam, and he had to put up with that. He was being accused of all that stuff.”

Six weeks later, throughout a go to by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who’s housing deportees whom Trump claims are felony unlawful immigrants, Trump was requested what number of extra folks he supposed to ship there. Trump responded with a 417-word reply that rapidly veered into boasts about his psychological acuity.

“By the way, I took my cognitive exam as part of my physical exam, and I got the highest mark. And one of the doctors said, ‘Sir, I’ve never seen anybody get that kind of ― that was the highest mark.’ I hope you’re happy with that, although they haven’t been bugging me too much to take a cognitive. But I did do my physical, and it was released. I hope you’re all happy with it. I noticed there’s no questions, so probably you are. But the cognitive, they said to me, ‘Sir, would you like to take a cognitive test?’ I said, ‘Did Biden take one?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did anybody take one?’ ‘No, not too many people took them.’ I said, ‘What about Obama, did he take one?’” Trump mentioned.

“The totality of his statements clearly show that he is utterly fucking off the rails,” mentioned Rick Wilson, a longtime GOP guide who grew to become an early Trump critic. “Most of the Washington media is still playing the polite game of pretending this is a normal White House, and so they just move on and move on and move on eternally into the future.”

Trump’s normally rambling, typically incoherent, at occasions downright deranged statements, in fact, didn’t cease on the 100-day mark.

On Day 102, in a Rose Garden celebration of the National Day of Prayer, Trump steered that Muslims are primarily terrorists keen to die to earn a reward of virgins in paradise: “Imams who I got to know in Michigan. I loved them. They were great, by the way. They said, ‘We don’t want to die.’ I said, ’Do you want to die? They said, ‘We don’t want to die.’ I said, ‘What about the 38 virgins?’”

On Day 106, in an Oval Office photograph alternative, Trump went on at size about his thought of reopening Alcatraz jail in San Francisco Bay. “I guess I was supposed to be a moviemaker. We started with the moviemaking, and we’ll end, I mean, it represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is, I would say the ultimate, right, Alcatraz, Sing-Sing and Alcatraz the movies,” he mentioned in a solution that continued for 268 phrases. “But it’s right now a museum, believe it or not. A lot of people go there. It housed the most violent criminals in the world, and nobody ever escaped. One person almost got there, but they, as you know the story, they found his clothing rather badly ripped up, and it was a lot of shark bites, a lot of problems.”

It’s unclear what movement photos that includes the jail as a setting need to do with reopening Alcatraz or why Trump believed his Muslim supporters in Michigan can be entitled to solely 38 virgins, simply over half of the 72 typically cited.

Among the posted transcripts are two media interviews he did. While Trump does quite a few interviews — most of which embrace statements that make him appear ignorant or silly or each — his press workers has posted solely two softball interviews: One by casual Trump adviser and Fox News host Sean Hannity dated Feb. 18 in addition to a two-minute one by Jamie Little, a Fox Sports NASCAR announcer on the Daytona 500 race that Trump had attended two days earlier.

And whereas the stenography workplace transcribes each White House briefing and question-and-answer session aboard Air Force One by press secretary Karoline Leavitt, she and her workers have launched solely two. One was her first briefing on Jan. 29, during which she promised to at all times inform the reality, which she then instantly adopted with an absurd falsehood about $50 million price of condoms being despatched to the Gaza Strip. The second was the Feb. 20 briefing during which she and different aides celebrated Trump’s first month in workplace.

Leavitt didn’t reply to HuffPost queries for this story.

Trump’s refusal to launch transcripts created at taxpayer expense is only one piece of his effort to decrease unbiased information media. He has seized management of the White House press pool, which covers his occasions that happen in confined areas just like the Oval Office and Air Force One, from the White House Correspondents Association, which had administered it since its inception a long time in the past.

Trump and his workers have changed journalists from legit information organizations with pro-Trump cheerleaders in most of the pool seats.

Trump additionally excluded the Associated Press from the pool as a result of it refused to bend to his will and name the Gulf of Mexico by the identify Trump decreed by fiat, the Gulf of America. When a federal decide dominated that Trump couldn’t deal with the AP any in a different way than it treats different wire companies, he responded by ending assigned pool slots for all three wires: the AP, Reuters and Bloomberg.

On Trump’s present tour to the Arabian Peninsula, his first prolonged international journey since he retook workplace in January, not one U.S. wire service print reporter has been a part of the pool aboard Air Force One or in conferences with varied officers — thereby degrading information protection for 1000’s of reports shops with billions of readers within the United States and globally.