The relative tepidness of the State Department under the Trump Administration appears to be yet another marker of the president's unconventional style of governance. With former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson in charge, the department is holding fewer weekly press briefings than any administration in the last 45 years — potentially a sign of its diminished capacity.
As the New York Times reports, the department's daily briefing has served as a substantive daily update about the state of the U.S.'s many interests overseas. The Times compiled all of the transcripts from administrations past to illustrate just how little the current administration is communicating with the public. Going back as far as 1979, during the Iran hostage crisis, the department has held a press briefing just about every single day. Under Trump, that average is down to 1.1 times per week.
The lack of transparency may be simply because the department isn’t getting much done. Hundreds of jobs are still unfilled, and the president continues to surprise his own staff by making sweeping declarations on Twitter. “No one’s sure what the policy is,” P.J. Crowley, a department spokesperson during the Obama administration, told the Times. “If you don’t know what the policy is, you don’t want to be communicating it. You don’t want to get out ahead of the president of the United States.”
