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President Trump said Sunday he’s considering moving reporters out of the White House briefing room they’ve worked from for decades.
Getting into it: In a post, Trump wrote that he is “thinking about moving the Press, and putting them in a different location,” but didn’t say where they’d go or when. The post, mostly aimed at comedian Bill Maher, came a day after Trump first floated the idea while blasting a New York Times report.
According to the Times’ Oct. 20 report, Trump wanted the press corps cleared out of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room and raised it with Leavitt, then his press secretary, back in August. He also told aides he’d prefer to bring back the indoor pool built for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.
Richard Nixon covered the pool and built the briefing room on top of it, and reporters have worked there since 1970.
Trump insisted he has no plans to bring the pool back, calling the idea “stupid,” but Leavitt herself said on Maher’s show Friday that he’d been toying with it. Trump also posted side-by-side images in September of the current briefing room and an ornate pool, captioned “Fake News Before” and “FDR Pool After.”
