Already suggested by many others, the NY Times' Bret Stephens suggests a media approach that makes sense to everyone but the media: "Stop sending reporters to [Trump's] press conferences, which long ago became theaters of no information."
To students of psychiatry, the president's press conferences may be enlightening, clinical presentations of raging mental disorders — narcissism atop piles of sociopathy atop heaps of eerie dissociation — but to hired journalists and the public, they're nothing more than a wasted hour away from reruns of "Gilligan's Island."
Trying to get an honest, nonaggressive, uninsulting answer from Trump about … anything … is like expecting a root canal to be pleasant. There are some things in this world that simply will never be. An informative press conference from Trump is one of them.
So why do television networks and radio broadcasters and major newspapers insist on sending their top journalists to these presidential charades? That is a question serious people have put to media executives for nearly two years — a rather rhetorical question, to no avail.
In addition to boycotting Trump's press conferences — excepting, perhaps, interns — the same media policy should be extended to Sarah Sanders' burlesques. About a CNN story titled "Troops bringing President Trump 'Make America Great Again' hats to sign may have violated a military rule," Sanders replied, "CNN will attack anyone who supports President Trump, including the brave men and women of our military who fight everyday to protect our freedom."
In this instance her response came in the alternative form of a tweet, not a vocal reply at one of her "press secretary" parodies, but 'twas the same sort of hollow garbage — Question —> Deflection — that she also hurls during White House appearances. Was there a material connection, a substantive link, even the remotest of relationships between the CNN's headline and her reaction? Not a whit. Her reply was but characteristic of all her replies to the media: Ask whatever you like, and I'll give you a hostile, utterly unrelated answer.
This plea, too, will be futile, yet along with Bret Stephens I'll present it — again — to media executives: Please stop sending your top-tier reporters to Trump's (and Sanders') press conferences. Send interns or your children or winos off the street, but don't send respected journalists who therefore lend an air of respectability to the empty, usually theatrical proceedings. For every time you do, you license not only Trump but yourselves to further degrade the once-honored office of POTUS.