The simmering cold, if heating up with every passing day, war between Trump and the press may be about to turn conventional, with the occasional chance of an ICBM.
Just days after calling out CNN fake news during his first press conference of 2017, Esquire reports that according to three senior officials on the transition team, the incoming Trump administration is "seriously considering" a plan to evict the press corps from the White House.
If the plan goes through, one of the officials said, the media will be removed from the cozy confines of the White House press room, where it has worked for several decades. Members of the press will be relocated to the White House Conference Center—near Lafayette Square—or to a space in the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House.
Trump's press secretary tried to cast the possible relocation of the press corps as a matter, in part, of logistics. "There's been so much interest in covering a President Donald Trump," he said. "A question is: Is a room that has forty-nine seats adequate? When we had that press conference the other day, we had thousands of requests, and we capped it at four hundred. Is there an opportunity to potentially allow more members of the media to be part of this? That's something we're discussing."
He added that "There has been no decision," yet but acknowledged that "there has been some discussion about how to do it."
Other Trump staffers, however, explain that it's not business, it's personal. "They are the opposition party," a senior official was quoted by Esquire. "I want 'em out of the building. We are taking back the press room."
A brief history of the White House press room:
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