Trump May Replace Press Conferences with Social Media

The White House Press Corps isn’t sure just how relevant they’ll be as President-elect Donald Trump is considering using Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to get his message directly to the people instead of having daily press briefings.

Conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump’s Press Secretary Sean Spicer if Trump would be doing traditional press conferences:

HH: Do you expect him to keep up a regular and as energetic a series of press conferences as previous presidents? Do you expect him to be more or less engaged than previous presidents with that setting, that formal East Room setting sort of thing?

SS: Yeah, that’s a good question, because I think the thing that you’ve seen with Donald Trump is that he doesn’t, he doesn’t look to the past and say I’ve got to conform to these precedents. He figures out what’s the best way. And so maybe we do, you know, a series of press conferences, but maybe we do some town hall, you know, Facebook town halls. Maybe we go out and solicit input from Twitter. I don’t, I mean, the answer is we’re looking at a lot of things. But there’s no question that you see through the platforms that exist right now, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, he’s closing in like 45 million people that he can have a conversation with.

So while President Trump will likely have a press conference here or there, it looks like Donald will be doing a whole lot of posting and tweeting to get his message directly to Americans.

Mainstream media elites will just have to adapt, because the incoming administration doesn’t look like they’ll be doing business as usual:

“Business as usual is over. And I think what I mean by that is that you know, the President-Elect looks at this and says what’s best for the country? How do we put America and Americans first and stop trying to figure out how we cater to you know, pundits and the establishment class, big donors,” said Spicer, “He is putting Americans first and foremost. And when he talks about Americans first, he means I don’t care what a bunch of elites tell me or people at a dinner party.”