Once upon a time, the White House press briefing was an institution where journalists pretended to ask real questions and press secretaries pretended to answer them. It was a genteel, mutually agreed-upon pantomime — like a polite divorce negotiation or the final season of The West Wing. But now the illusion has collapsed so thoroughly that the only humane thing left to do is wheel the whole enterprise behind the Rose Garden and put it down.

This week offered the most compelling argument yet. Laura Loomer and former Rep. Matt Gaetz — not exactly Woodward and Bernstein — crashed the Department of War’s first press conference. They took spots in the press corps that opened up after old-school Pentagon reporters chose to surrender their building passes rather than sign a controversial new agreement with the department’s press office.

The optics were absurd. Loomer has been called Trump’s chief loyalty enforcer, an attack dog against Republicans who refuse to kiss the president’s ring sufficiently. Meanwhile, Matt Gaetz, no longer a member of Congress after resigning from his seat last year, wandered into a Pentagon briefing wearing a jacket embroidered with “Representative Matt Gaetz,” like a middle-aged man wearing his high-school letterman jacket to a reunion. The idea of the Right-wing provocateur and Trump’s former Attorney General pick LARPing as reporters is about as serious as if Joe Biden had handed Hunter a press badge and asked him to quiz the DOJ on pardon guidelines.

But let’s not pretend Loomer and Gaetz somehow broke a noble institution. The briefing didn’t die this week. It’s been a zombie since the Nineties, when Bill Clinton’s press secretary, Mike McCurry, first allowed the networks to televise the daily briefing live, instantly transforming it from an accountability mechanism into a political performance.

It’s impossible to feel nostalgic about the final years of the Bush administration, when then-press secretary Scott McClellan stood at the podium insisting, with the serene calm of a man reading from a hostage script, that the Iraq War was going according to plan (he later admitted it was part of a “political propaganda campaign”). Under Obama, who was once called a “puppet master” by Politico for his ability to manipulate the press, the conferences had a level of stage management so suffocating that one former assistant press secretary eventually argued that the whole charade should simply be ended.

Sean Spicer arrived at the podium under Trump’s first term like a community theatre actor who’d wandered onto the wrong set. Who can forget him hiding in White House shrubbery to dodge questions about James Comey? Or referring to Nazi gas chambers as “Holocaust centres”?

By the Biden years, Karine Jean-Pierre had turned the briefing into an existential endurance test — a kind of bureaucratic ASMR. Her greatest hits included “The president has been clear” (he wasn’t), “We’re monitoring that” (they weren’t), and “I’d refer you to the DOJ” (who’d never comment). Watching her work was like watching a loading screen stuck at 87%. Indeed, an interview she conducted with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner on her ill-fated book tour was compared to “watching Mike Tyson fight a baby.”

But KJP’s brand of vacuous monotony now feels almost quaint. The briefing room under Trump II feels like an influencer house, where government officials and “journalists” churn out video clips for their respective echo chambers. The entire enterprise has collapsed into a stage set, a haunted Potemkin village of accountability where no one actually communicates anything.

So here’s the modest proposal: kill it. Lock the doors of the press hall and fill the room with concrete. Or turn it into a Spirit Halloween — it’s already haunted by the ghosts of credibility past.

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Ryan Zickgraf is a columnist for UnHerd, based in Pennsylvania.

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