President Donald Trump was caught on a hot mic telling a Fox News reporter to give him a favorable review of the first presidential Cabinet meeting of his second term.
Trump’s banter with Lawrence Jones of Fox & Friends comes amid a much-debated White House press crackdown and was caught on an Associated Press microphone as the media filed out of the meeting.
Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt thanked members the press for attending the hour-long meeting, with Trump piping up and saying: “Thank you very much, Pulitzer Prize!”
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He noticed Jones leaving and added: “Lawrence! Look at Lawrence! This guy’s making a fortune! He never had it so good!”
He then urged Jones, perhaps jokingly, to give him a good review. “Lawrence, say we did a great job, please. OK? Say it was unbelievable!”
The comment was picked up by a longer live stream hosted by the Associated Press but did not make the White House feed.
The meeting itself was dominated by “special government employee” Elon Musk.
“Well, I should just call myself a humble tech support here,” he told the assembled crowd, repeating one of his well-worn jokes while revealing his “tech support” T-shirt.
“We spend a lot on the Defense Department, but we’re spending like, over a trillion dollars on interest. If this continues, the country will go, become de facto bankrupt,” Musk said, calling his job—whatever that is—“an essential thing.”
Trump’s hot mic remark comes after one of the AP’s reporters was barred from an event in the Oval Office earlier this month after the outlet refused to use Trump’s preferred name “Gulf of America” for the Gulf of Mexico. On Monday, a federal judge declined to halt Trump’s ban.
Meanwhile, Leavitt said during a press briefing on Tuesday that the White House press team would now dictate who makes up the floating press “pool” of reporters who cover the president, and not the White House Correspondents’ Association.
