A press briefing usually hides its own stage management, but Tuesday’s didn’t.
Attorney General Todd Blanche took a turn behind the podium in the Rose Garden, filling in as White House press secretary while the administration keeps searching for someone to permanently replace Karoline Leavitt, who left the role late last month.
Before he’d even gotten to the actual news, Blanche let the setup slip. “I will take questions if there are any. And I know it’s a different environment than before; I notice you guys are sweating, which is nice. I love to see that. We’ll start out with…” he said, trailing off into a list only he could see.
Reporters, sensing an opening, started talking over each other trying to grab the first question anyway. Blanche shut that down fast. “They give you a list, guys. Everybody calm down,” he said, confirming in one sentence what plenty of people had long suspected about how these briefings actually work.
😎👏🙌 “They give you a list guys. EVERYBODY CALM DOWN” @AGToddBlanche 🙌😎 https://t.co/alFuVR2HVn
— Red Trumper 🗽🎺🎺🎺🗽 (@Redhead4645) September 15, 2026
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The list wasn’t random, and it definitely wasn’t neutral.
Blanche’s first call went to National Review, a conservative outlet, followed by a second question from the right-leaning Daily Caller. Both questions handed him convenient openings to defend the administration, one on the Supreme Court’s mail-in voting ruling, the other on a fraud investigation targeting Rep. Ilhan Omar.
The irony here traces straight back to Trump himself. He’s spent years accusing Joe Biden of doing exactly this.
Back in 2023, Trump posted on Truth Social that “Biden calls on a specific reporter, gets a question, then reads the answer off a card,” framing it as a scandal.
Two years earlier, he’d made a similar claim on X, writing that Biden “was given the questions, just like Crooked Hillary. Never have seen this before!”
Biden was asked questions at his so-called Press Conference yesterday where he read the answers from a teleprompter. That means he was given the questions, just like Crooked Hillary. Never have seen this before!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2020
Fact-checkers and the White House Correspondents’ Association pushed back on those claims at the time, and a Biden adviser once dismissed the accusation as “laughable.”
Other Trump officials have stumbled into the same reveal recently, which suggests this isn’t a one-person problem. When JD Vance filled in as press secretary earlier this month, he held up a literal seating chart so he’d know exactly where to look when calling on reporters. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried a similar list in August, only to call on someone who wasn’t even in the room, leaving him standing in silence for several awkward seconds before moving on to someone who actually showed up.
Featured image via X screengrab
