Trump’s Big Press Conference — a ‘Failing Pile of Garbage’

With only nine days to go until inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump held his first press conference in 167 days on Wednesday amid the fallout from an old piece of opposition research that detonated a little late — resulting in a fiery performance and some hard core media-bashing by Trump. Having tweeted 1,605 times since the last time he faced open questions from reporters, the President-elect quickly returned to his old schoolyard bully self at the press conference once things got tough.

Flanked by American flags and stacks of manilla folders full of business documents, Trump began the conference by letting off some steam about the leak of an intelligence dossier which claims the Kremlin has compromising information about him. The dossier had been passed on to FBI director James Comey several months ago by John McCain when the Arizona Republican came across it, and several news agencies claimed to have seen it prior to the election but all ultimately elected not to publish it, as none of the claims could be substantiated.

The dossier was also included in briefings given to both President Obama and President-elect Trump, as well as some members of Congress. The scandalous claims about Trump remained unsubstantiated nonetheless, and the dossier bounced around the political and media elite world until it fell into the hands of Buzzfeed — who hardly represent the pinnacle of journalistic integrity, and gladly published it.

The result — a full blown Trump-temper-tantrum at Wednesday’s press conference. Less than a minute after beginning to speak, the President-elect suggested that the dossier had been “released maybe by the intelligence agencies” and went on to assert that it would be a “tremendous blot” on their record had they done so. The accusation was so severe that it prompted a response from the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who sought to assure Trump that the intelligence community was not responsible for the leak.

Buzzfeed was forcefully labeled a “failing pile of garbage” by Trump, as the President-elect combined his favorite adjective normally used to attack news organizations (e.g. the ‘failing’ N.Y. Times) while adding a creative twist and conjuring up beautiful mental images of hot, steaming garbage to show just how angry he was. Referring to the contents of the dossier, Trump said “it’s all fake news, it’s phony stuff, it didn’t happen” and that “sick people put that crap together”. He repeatedly called the dossier “an absolute disgrace”, arguing that allegations of specific sexual activities he participated in while in Russia couldn’t be true, considering he is keenly aware of the tiny hidden cameras prevalent in hotels around the world and is also “very much of a germaphobe”.

Trump really started to lose his cool when he was once again pressed on his tax returns, this time being asked if he would release them to prove that he has no financial ties to Russia — and asked again when he failed to answer the question. After being asked a second time, the President-elect began talking over reporters and raising his voice to vigorous applause on behalf of his staff and family standing off to the side. At one point during a rant about the leaked intelligence dossier, Trump singled out CNN in particular for reporting on Buzzfeed’s publishing of the document, demanding that they apologize and calling them “fake news”.

Seizing on the moment in which he had just been singled out, CNN’s Jim Acosta tried to ask Trump about the sanctions that President Obama placed on Russia but the President-elect refused to answer, telling him not to be rude and repeating “not you, not you — your organization is terrible.” The tense verbal standoff ended with the next reporter that Trump called on asking the same question, to which he responded that he didn’t think Obama went too far with the sanctions. When asked how he would respond to Senator Lindsey Graham’s plan to send him a bill for tougher sanctions on Russia, Trump appeared stunned — asking “plans to send me a bill for what? — I hadn’t heard Lindsey Graham was going to do that.”

One silver lining to the ugliness of the press conference was an olive branch extended on behalf of Fox’s Shepard Smith, who came to the defense of CNN, saying that “neither they nor any other journalists should be subjected to belittling and delegitimizing by the president-elect of the United States.” What exactly the Trump team hoped to get out of the conference remains unclear, their initial stated purpose was for Trump to outline his plans for divestment but that won’t be happening as he announced that his sons Donald Jr. and Eric will be in charge of his businesses from now on — hardly a blind trust.

Perhaps the conference was meant to be a distraction from Rex Tillerson’s first day of confirmation hearings, although Russia still seemed to loom over Trump’s questioning by the press just as much as it did Tillerson’s questioning by the Senate Wednesday with adamant Russia-hawks like McCain, Graham, and Rubio holding the power to nix any nominee given the slim two-seat Republican majority. Regardless, if the frequency of Trump’s press conferences is actually determined by how fair he feels he’s being treated then I don’t think we should expect another one any time soon because this one could best be described in the President-elect’s own words as a “pile of garbage.”