David Nakamura

The Trump administration spoke out forcefully against efforts by China and Myanmar to punish news reporters and political dissidents. But at the White House, President Donald Trump was focused on another case — his efforts to discredit CNN correspondent Jim Acosta. Acosta and others like him are “bad for the country,” President Trump told a conservative news outlet.

For the past eight years, a presidential news conference was a chance to hear from Professor Obama, the long-winded lecturer in chief who expounded on domestic politics and international relations with nuance, depth, range and, most of all, a lot of words. Under the new administration, brevity is in.

President Trump, who has carved out a niche online as the tweeter in chief, is willing to go beyond 140 characters while fielding questions from reporters at the White House. But sometimes, it seems, not by much. Trump’s joint news conferences with foreign leaders are brisker affairs. He is not interested in filibustering answers to run out the clock, the way Obama did, but prefers racing through them in a mix of simplistic declarative sentences, ad-libs and non sequiturs. When he does fall back on talking points, as all politicians inevitably do, they are not the kind that come from a briefing book prepared by an aide. Rather, Trump’s talking points often appear to spring from his own id and have little or nothing to do with the subject at hand.