If you talked to the Biden administration, Joe talked to the media more than anyone ever, including Trump.
That is a lie, of course, and Trump just crushed Biden, already having more than 500 press interactions.
In fact, Trump’s numbers hold up better than just about every president in modern history.
Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre always defended Joe Biden on this front, once insisting that Biden took way more questions than Trump when he was in office.
During one press conference, Karine Jean-Pierre stated, "The informal and informative Q&A that the President Biden engages in the — in with the press corps is more than — more than the last three Presidents… If you think about the informal questions and the formal questions. And I told — I mentioned to all of you yesterday that we actually had some — some data to share. It’s more than Presidents Trump; it’s more than Obama — Obama — combined —.”
It was comical, and it did not take the White House very long to figure out that she was just wrong.
When the transcript was issued, “questions” was replaced with "question-and-answer sessions,” while also adding that it was "in the first 20 months of their presidencies.” Even so, the numbers just don’t add up, and it is not even close.
According to White House records, Trump has had at least 493 exchanges with reporters already, including at least 153 interviews, which blows away his number during the same period from his first term (95).
Kumar, a professor emerita at Towson University in Maryland and director of the White House Transition Project, explained, “One of the reasons that [press engagement] doubled is that he came in with a much clearer agenda to discuss than he had in his first term.”
She concluded, “A benefit of having non-consecutive terms is that he could think not only about the agenda he wanted to have, but how to present it.”
This puts Trump way ahead of any modern-day president.
When I said the numbers for Jean-Pierre did not add up, we can go back and look at the official reports.
During Trump’s first term, from January 2017 to April 2018, Trump had over 500 addresses and remarks, well above what Biden reportedly had. Trump had 170 Q&A sessions during that period, so he surely passed Biden’s 300 “questions and answers” that Jean-Pierre had claimed.
If you look at previous presidents dating back to Ronald Reagan, only Bill Clinton, 321, and George W. Bush, 180, surpassed Trump’s first-term numbers.
Needless to say, Trump has left the most transparent and accessible president in history in the dust during his second term.
