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CV NEWS FEED // Multiple sources confirmed this week that President Donald Trump answered over 1,000 questions from reporters during the first month of his second term.
The tally is significantly higher than the number of questions answered by former President Barack Obama during the first month of his first term and former President Joe Biden during the first month of his term.
The 1,009 media questions Trump replied to from Jan. 20th to Feb. 19th also dwarfed the 199 he answered during the same period at the start of his first term in 2017.
National Journal’s George Condon reported that it had taken Trump not even “three days to eclipse the 141 questions former President Biden took in his first month.”
Condon added that at the end of the third day of Trump’s second term, Trump had already answered 164 questions – 23 more than the number of questions Biden answered in ten times as long.
Also on his third day in office, Trump had gone “past the known count of 161 questions in former President Obama’s first month in 2009,” Condon pointed out, “though that carries an asterisk because transcripts don’t exist for most of the interviews he granted.”
One day later, Trump had answered 200 questions.
It is unclear how many questions from reporters Obama answered during the first month of his second term in 2013.
In his article, Condon quoted White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who said that in the span of one month, Trump took “questions from the press … nearly every single day, sometimes on multiple occasions.”
“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,” said Leavitt, a Catholic.
At the start of her first press conference last month, Leavitt announced that Trump was opening up his White House Briefing Room to “new media voices.”
“We welcome independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers, content creators to apply for credentials to cover this White House,” she said at the time.
