'Most Transparent' White House In History Keeps Majority Of Trump's Remarks Secret

Yahoo

15-05-2025

WASHINGTON — If you're interested in finding Donald Trump's precise words as he lied about his failed coup attempt in his Jan. 20 remarks at the U.S. Capitol soon after his inaugural speech, good luck with that.
Same with his Feb. 12 thoughts in the Oval Office on how magnetism, in his view 'a new theory,' doesn't work on the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford.
Or his statements in the Feb. 28 meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, berating the Ukrainian president and empathizing with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin instead.
Ditto with his April 14 explanation of how well he is doing with 'the cognitive' compared to previous occupants of the White House.
The self-proclaimed 'most transparent' White House in history, as it turns out, has little interest in making the vast majority of Trump's speeches and interactions with journalists readily accessible to the public whose taxes pay for their transcription, publishing just 29 transcripts of the 146 public remarks Trump made in his first 100 days in office.
Trump's White House posted transcripts for only 11 of the 40 speeches in which Trump did not take questions from the media, and for only one of his six formal news conferences, according to a HuffPost review. And of the 98 media 'availabilities' in which Trump took questions from reporters informally — a practice that his aides point to as proof of his great accessibility — only 15 of the transcripts have been made public.
Previous White Houses, going back decades, made all of the transcripts compiled by the non-political stenography office, staffed by career civil servants, available in printed form, via email and on the White House website, as a matter of course. Trump's first-term staff also published all his remarks, with the exception of his speeches at rallies and fundraisers. Trump's second-term White House stopped emailing transcripts to its press list just five days after taking office, and of late has largely stopped posting them on the website, too. As of Thursday morning, the last transcript from Trump on the site is from March 13.
Trump aides would not explain their decision to withhold 80% of the transcripts that have been prepared. White House communications director Steven Cheung, however, did insult HuffPost for asking the question:
'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 statement be published 'in full.'
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said transcriptions of a president's remarks have always been seen as historical records, not things to be politicized. 'Making the words of the president readily available is part of the accountability obligation of the White House,' she said.
'The public has the right to know what the leader says ... It's a mark of a democratic system,' she added, saying that she could not speculate as to why Trump is withholding most of his transcripts' release. 'Trying to figure out why this White House does what it does requires a skill far beyond mine.'
While it is true that videos of nearly all of Trump's public remarks are available on C-SPAN, YouTube or other websites, they are not easily searchable by topic or keyword. There are private firms that transcribe his words, but they are not comprehensive and not well-known to the public.
Indeed, Trump critics say that increasing the difficulty of finding his exact words on any given topic is precisely the point of keeping most of the official transcripts a secret. After 10 years of hearing him, Trump's outlandish claims and constant lies have become mere background noise to many Americans, they argue, while actually reading his statements hits in a different way.
'They know the transcripts will reveal, on paper, the word salad and incoherence that characterizes Trump,' said 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 top press aide in the Joe Biden White House, said his counterparts in the Trump White House clearly understand that reading what Trump has said does not reflect well on him. 'He keeps saying things that are a liability, like talking about dolls and pencils. Or just getting confused,' Bates said.
The Biden press office famously altered punctuation in a transcript to make it seem that Biden was criticizing a smaller subset of Trump supporters than the transcript originally suggested. The Biden team, nonetheless, released that transcript and appears to have released all those prepared by the stenography office, totaling well over 2,000 over four years.
The Trump press shop, in contrast, appears to have decided that the best way to avoid negative media coverage of his transcribed remarks is to not release them in the first place. A comparison of the posted transcripts versus the remarks for which the transcripts have been withheld suggests an effort to conceal Trump's most outrageous, factually inaccurate or lie-filled statements.
On Inauguration Day, for example, while the transcript for the official speech given immediately after Trump took the oath of office is available on the White House website, a second one he gave to congressional Republicans soon afterward is not.
In that one, he again pushed his oft-repeated lies about Jan. 6, 2021, the day he encouraged a mob of his followers to march on the Capitol and then tried to use their assault on police officers and other violence to remain in power despite having lost the 2020 election. Trump bemoaned that his staff talked him out of including that material in his actual inaugural address.
'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 said in a 1,232-word section that repeatedly blamed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for all that happened 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 national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, Trump offered nonsensical answers to a variety of questions, including one about waste and fraud in the federal government. Trump launched into a 1,710-word rant on military contractors, including the builders of the newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, which uses a high-tech electromagnetic catapult system to launch airplanes to reduce stress on their airframes and landing 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 said, not appearing to understand the rationale for the 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 end of that month, Trump and Vice President JD Vance attacked Ukraine's Zelenskyy for not being sufficiently grateful to the United States before Trump turned to his familiar defense of Putin, who continues to slaughter Ukrainian civilians to this day through aerial attacks 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 said during a 206-word tangent again 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, during a visit by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who is housing deportees whom Trump claims are criminal illegal immigrants, Trump was asked how many more people he intended to ship there. Trump responded with a 417-word answer that quickly veered into boasts about his mental 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 said.
'The totality of his statements clearly show that he is utterly fucking off the rails,' said Rick Wilson, a longtime GOP consultant who became 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 usually rambling, often incoherent, at times downright deranged statements, of course, did not stop at the 100-day mark.
On Day 102, in a Rose Garden celebration of the National Day of Prayer, Trump suggested that Muslims are primarily terrorists willing 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 photo opportunity, Trump went on at length about his idea of reopening Alcatraz prison 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 said in an answer that continued for 268 words. '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 motion pictures featuring the prison as a setting have to do with reopening Alcatraz or why Trump believed his Muslim supporters in Michigan would be entitled to only 38 virgins, just over half of the 72 customarily cited.
Among the posted transcripts are two media interviews he did. While Trump does numerous interviews — most of which include statements that make him seem ignorant or foolish or both — his press staff has posted only two softball interviews: One by informal Trump adviser and Fox News host Sean Hannity dated Feb. 18 as well as a two-minute one by Jamie Little, a Fox Sports NASCAR announcer at the Daytona 500 race that Trump had attended two days earlier.
And while the stenography office transcribes every White House briefing and question-and-answer session aboard Air Force One by press secretary Karoline Leavitt, she and her staff have released only two. One was her first briefing on Jan. 29, in which she promised to always tell the truth, which she then immediately followed with an absurd falsehood about $50 million worth of condoms being sent to the Gaza Strip. The second was the Feb. 20 briefing in which she and other aides celebrated Trump's first month in office.
Leavitt did not respond to HuffPost queries for this story.
Trump's refusal to release transcripts created at taxpayer expense is just one piece of his effort to diminish independent news media. He has seized control of the White House press pool, which covers his events that take place in confined spaces like the Oval Office and Air Force One, from the White House Correspondents Association, which had administered it since its inception decades ago.
Trump and his staff have replaced journalists from legitimate news organizations with pro-Trump cheerleaders in many of the pool seats.
Trump also excluded the Associated Press from the pool because it refused to bend to his will and call the Gulf of Mexico by the name Trump decreed by fiat, the Gulf of America. When a federal judge ruled that Trump could not treat the AP any differently than it treats other wire services, he responded by ending assigned pool slots for all three wires: the AP, Reuters and Bloomberg.
On Trump's current excursion to the Arabian Peninsula, his first extended foreign trip since he retook office in January, not one U.S. wire service print reporter has been part of the pool aboard Air Force One or in meetings with various officials — thereby degrading news coverage for thousands of news outlets with billions of readers in the United States and globally.