Donald Trump considers another ambitious project for the White House. After the ballroom and the helipad, the president is aiming for an indoor swimming pool instead of the press room. A move that would have a double result: providing Pennsylvania Avenue with a new useful structure and above all expelling the media from the White House, thus continuing its relentless battle against what it considers “fake news” and “enemies of the people”. Trump has been toying with the idea for some time.
In his first term he had aired it without success. In recent months he published a photo on his social network Truth with two images, on one side the press room and on the other a swimming pool in its place. The idea has recently been submitted several times, most recently in August, to former White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt without however achieving any results.
Leavitt resigned at the end of August. The tycoon’s plans include restoring the swimming pool built in 1933 by former president Franklin D. Roosevelt to its old splendor, then emptied and covered by Richard Nixon to create space for the growing number of journalists who followed the White House, initially as a relaxation room and office for reporters, where press officers held briefings.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan made it a full-fledged press box with a low stage at the west end and fixed seating. In 2000, Bill Clinton named it after James S. Brady, Reagan’s spokesman who was paralyzed and injured by John Hinckley Jr., the man who attempted to assassinate the then president. The closure of the Jams S. Brady Briefing Room would cause the removal of journalists from the White House, an objective that Trump has long pursued in various forms.
He went from insults, like the last Tuesday in the Oval Office against a reporter from the British Independent – “Are you sick?” he asked him angrily – to banning some newspapers from accessing the White House. Among these CNN, which has threatened further legal action if Trump continues to ban her access to Air Force One. The swimming pool could open a new front of conflict that is difficult to revoke even for a new president, effectively debasing the importance that has always been recognized in the closeness to the president by a free press within a constitutional democracy.