“Everyone’s exhausted and he hasn’t even taken workplace but,” Peter Baker, chief White Home correspondent for The New York Instances, says of White Home reporters already consumed by overlaying a second Donald Trump administration.
With no time for a break, the grueling 2024 election cycle shortly morphed right into a tumultuous transition interval attribute of Trump’s first time period in workplace. From promising to dismantle the federal authorities and proposing sweeping tariffs on Mexico and Canada to rolling out a slew of controversial Cupboard nominees—together with the already-withdrawn former consultant Matt Gaetz—and installing Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in a brand new division, Trump has already supplied a gentle stream of developments. With greater than seven weeks till the inauguration, reporters I’ve spoken to who coated Trump’s first time period within the Oval Workplace see the indicators of a punishing information cycle to return in his second presidency.
“Anyone who went by way of it the final time remembers how nonstop it was. It finally ends up form of turning into all-consuming and taking on your life. It wears you down,” Baker says, including that “it’s a must to count on that overlaying an enormous story is, by definition, taxing as a result of it’s vital.” The Instances’ chief White Home correspondent tells me that whereas Trump’s capability to seize headlines is as current as ever, it’s “not as novel this time.”
Baker is amongst a lot of distinguished reporters steeped in overlaying Trump, a gaggle that features colleagues like Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Michael Bender, in addition to opponents reminiscent of Politico’s Meridith McGraw, The Washington Publish’s Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker, The Hill’s Julia Manchester, The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo, Puck’s Tara Palmeri, and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who was named the community’s chief White Home correspondent on Tuesday.
Whereas these reporters (and plenty of extra) will undoubtedly faucet their sources to ferret info out of the White Home, Trump has a behavior of breaking information himself by posting on social media at inopportune instances, together with late at evening and on weekends. Baker says that after studying from 2016, information organizations have a accountability to “acknowledge that we’re not going to leap on each single stray voltage that comes out of his cellphone.”
McGraw, who serves as a nationwide political correspondent for Politico, agrees, noting that shops aren’t going to be “hair on fireplace” over each single social media publish that Trump makes, as an alternative “considering bigger-picture about tales” on the administration and its insurance policies. Nevertheless, “regardless of the place Trump goes, what he does, there’s behind-the-scenes drama and intrigue” that tends to distract from the extra boilerplate coverage information, she provides.
The Politico reporter captured Trump’s post-insurrection retreat to Mar-a-Lago and the seeds of his comeback in her ebook, Trump in Exile, including to the veritable canon of journalist books on the president-elect’s races and chaotic first term in the White House. McGraw says she shouldn’t be anticipating the tempo of reports to let up anytime quickly, pointing to the transition as an “indicator for the quantity and velocity of reports that we will count on” in a second Trump administration.
