Donald Trump put himself and his mental faculties on display Tuesday, giving TV cameras and reporters a 55-minute look inside a negotiating session with key members of Congress about immigration reform.
In a book released Friday, columnist Michael Wolff argues that all of the president’s inner circle fears that his mental faculties are deteriorating.
A White House official told DailyMail.com that keeping the press in the room for nearly the entire immigration summit was ‘all the president’s idea.’
‘This is the president we see every day,’ the official added. ‘He works ridiculously hard, he’s laser-focused on getting results, and he knows how to lead people.’
President Donald Trump held a rare open meeting with lawmakers on immigration policy in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Tuesday, allowing the press to watch legislative sausage being made firsthand
Letting reporters witness the entire 55-minute negotiating session was ‘all the president’s idea’ according to a White House official
The meeting was a chance for the president to demonstrate that claims by author Michael Wolff (above) that he’s suffering from dementia are untrue
The White House has pushed back somewhat against Wolff’s narrative, especially after he admission in a weekend TV interview on CBS that he hadn’t Vice President Mike Pence or any members of Trump’s cabinet.
Showing the president in action, though, is a more direct tactic that a tweet or a comment in the White House press briefing room.
There is precedent for open and transparent presidential meetings.
In February 2010 Barack Obama allowed reporters to witness all six hours of a summit on health care hosted at Blair House.
A few weeks earlier he appeared at a House Republican Conference retreat in Baltimore, engaging in a back and forth with GOP lawmakers about a range of issues.
But no one at the time questioned Obama’s fitness for office, even though he was a first-term senator with limited executive governing experience at the time he was elected to the White House.
And neither of those meetings was held in the White House, just steps away from the Oval Office.
A rotating ‘pool’ of reporters from print, newswires, radio and TV outlets typically gets to witness the opening minutes of a meeting like Tuesday’s. Known as ‘pool sprays,’ the photo-ops are generally accompanied by platitudes, not policy talk.
Trump’s meeting, however, was a planned demonstration of his fluency with immigration policy, including his demand for a wall along the southern U.S. border and his commitment to tightening so-called ‘chain migration.’
The extended immigration negotiations also seemed calculated to push back against an Axios report claiming Trump is spending an increasing amount of time tweeting and watching TV – labeled ‘executive time’ – and not showing up to the Oval Office until 11:00 a.m. each day.
The White House has already disputed this.
‘It is ludicrous when many of you yourselves have reported on the fact that the president exhibits yeoman-like work every day in this job,’ Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley told reporters on board Air Force One on Monday.
Gidley added that the president spends his morning hours ‘talking to the cabinet, talking to the chief of staff, calling members of the Congress and the Senate.’
Trump urged some of those lawmakers on Tuesday to find a bipartisan solution to protect thousands of young illegal immigrants from deportation, but repeated his demand that any agreement must include funding for a border wall with Mexico.
The president said he would sign any bill that gives protection to young ‘Dreamer’ immigrants as long as it had the border security protections he has sought.
‘If you don’t have the wall, you don’t have security,’ Trump told the lawmakers.
‘You folks are going to have to come up with a solution, and if you do, I’m going to sign that solution.’
House Republicans said they planned to soon introduce legislation to address border security and the young immigrants. Trump said, ‘it should be a bill of love.’