WASHINGTON — Mere days after HuffPost revealed how few of President Donald Trump’s transcribed remarks it was making public, his White House decided to post none at all, save for his Jan. 20 inaugural address.
HuffPost’s May 15 report showed that, breaking from every previous presidential administration in modern times, Trump’s second-term press office was releasing only a small fraction of the transcripts produced by the nonpartisan civil servants who produce them at taxpayer expense.
Over his first 100 days in office, Trump’s White House had released just 29 of the 146 transcripts of his speeches, news conferences and interactions with news media. White House staff did not offer any reason for why they were withholding material that had been released as a matter of course by previous White Houses, including Trump’s first-term White House.
At some point between the evening of Saturday, May 17, and the afternoon of Monday, May 19, though, the White House pulled down all of Trump’s transcripts that had been posted — along with several of Vice President JD Vance’s transcripts and two of press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s – and replaced them with videos of Trump’s speeches, according to pages preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine tool.
The near-total purge was first reported by NBC.
The White House on Thursday again refused to offer an explanation for the change, but did provide a statement from Leavitt that equates transcripts, which can be searched for certain words and names, with videos, which cannot.
The Washington Post via Getty Images
“The president’s remarks are live on the website for every person in the world, including journalists, to access and watch for themselves. The Trump White House is the most transparent in history,” Leavitt said.
Neither of her assertions, however, is accurate. The White House’s “Remarks” web page now offers a curated sample of videos of Trump’s remarks, with few of the interactions with news media that tend to generate his most outlandish claims, or the events in which he exhibited particularly unhinged behavior. For example, the Feb. 28 meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which he and Vance essentially blamed Ukraine for getting invaded by Russia and demanded mineral concessions in exchange for U.S. assistance, is not posted on the page. In all, the page linked to only 48 videos Thursday, out of some 200 total sets of remarks by that point.
What’s more, while Trump interacts with the news media frequently, he has refused to abide by basic transparency measures that previous presidents have undertaken. Trump, for example, has never released any of his tax returns and his White House does not make public its visitors’ logs. While previous presidents permitted reporters in to fundraisers, Trump has not.
And on Thursday, as Trump hosts 220 buyers of his souvenir crypto coins at his Virginia golf resort behind closed doors, neither he nor the White House will release a list of those attendees, who in total spent $192 million for the privilege.
