President Donald Trump abruptly halted Monday’s White House press junket, shutting down CNN’s Kristen Holmes for allegedly attempting to leak plot points about his highly anticipated diplomatic follow-up with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
President Donald Trump abruptly halted Monday’s White House press junket, shutting down CNN’s Kristen Holmes for allegedly attempting to leak plot points about his highly anticipated diplomatic follow-up with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
The midday briefing was intended as a soft rollout for the administration’s domestic policy slate, but the room turned hostile when Holmes brazenly bypassed the standard press embargo. By asking whether Trump had spoken with Kim regarding the curtailment of U.S. military exercises, the senior correspondent threatened to ruin a major third-act reveal that the West Wing has spent months aggressively guarding from the trades.
Furious at the unauthorized teaser, the president immediately stepped in to protect the viewing experience. Calling Holmes a "loud, boisterous person," Trump ordered her to be quiet before she could reveal any further script details to an audience that prefers to experience its geopolitical realignments completely blind.
You do not ask a sitting president if he is pulling troops out of the demilitarized zone before the official teaser drops, just like you don't ask who dies in the next Marvel movie.
The press room outburst comes at a highly sensitive moment for the administration's international slate. Tracking for the North Korea storyline has been notoriously soft since their last summit failed to meet its massive four-quadrant box-office projections, leaving the president's reps scrambling to reposition the reclusive dictator as a bankable co-lead capable of anchoring a global press tour.
A publicist for the Joint Chiefs of Staff declined to comment on rumors that the military exercises in question were already being heavily rewritten in post-production.