President Trump reportedly took 1,009 questions in his first month, 7 times more than Biden
President Donald Trump reportedly answered more than 1,000 questions in the first month of his second term, surpassing both previous presidents and the first 30 days of his first term.
During the 2024 campaign, both former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were frequently criticized for their lack of unscripted media appearances. Trump, by contrast, has made it a cornerstone of his public image and his political career that he is willing to offer off-the-cuff remarks at a moment's notice, something which has shown no signs of slowing down in his second term.
National Journal White House correspondent George E. Condon Jr. reported that his news outlet tracked 1,009 questions the president had answered in the past month, from less than an hour of taking office up until last Wednesday night.
"It took Trump only three days to eclipse the 141 questions former President Biden took in his first month; Trump took 164 questions by the end of his third day," Condon wrote. "That day, he also went past the known count of 161 questions in former President Obama's first month in 2009, though that carries an asterisk because transcripts don't exist for most of the interviews he granted."
The White House correspondent added further, "It took Trump only one more day to blow past the questions he took in his first month in 2017 — 200 questions by the end of his fourth day compared to 199 for his first term's entire first month."
David Greenberg, a professor of both history and journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, said the findings show that Trump considers himself his own best mouthpiece.
"These numbers speak for themselves," he told the Journal . "They probably don't need a lot of analysis. It clearly shows a comfort level with being his own spokesman. … He enjoys it. He thinks of himself as a persuasive personality, or he enjoys the attention—or both. And he may not be wrong. He has demonstrated that he can command a following for the way he puts his ideas."
Martha Joynt Kumar, Towson University professor emerita of political science and leading scholar on White House press operations, told The National Journal that Trump is using the Oval Office to speak directly to Americans in a way that grabs their attention.
"People stop when they see a president in the Oval Office talking on their television. They want to know what he's saying," she said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has noted the president's accessibility – a stark contrast to Biden.
"Over the past month, the president has taken questions from the press—all of you—nearly every single day, sometimes on multiple occasions," she said. "President Trump set the tone on this approach immediately when he took more than 12 times the questions in his first few hours in office as Joe Biden did in his entire first week."
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