Hey Robert Mueller, are you having trouble pinning down Trump? Join the club

Hey, Robert Mueller, I gather you’ve been having a hard time pinning down the president to ask him a few questions. Well, join the club. We in the media – the purveyors of ‘fake news’ as he likes to call us – know a thing or two about that too. The man is as evasive as a skunk at noon.

This may sound like a bit of a whine, but the fact is Donald Trump hasn’t submitted to a traditional presidential press conference for over a year. Yes, really, over a year. The last time reporters got the chance to grill him in the way past presidents have been grilled was on 16 February last year. Maybe Valentines Day with Melania had put him in a giving mood.

To put that in perspective, in just their first year in office Barack Obama held 11 solo news conferences, George W Bush held five, and Bill Clinton a dozen. So Trump appearing just once is a clear break from tradition. Now we are several months into his second year and zilch, zero.

We know you’re frustrated because somehow you or one of your allies contrived this morning to leak the questions you have prepared for him onto the front pages of the morning papers. You gave the original scoop to the New York Times. Why not? You have more than four dozen of them and they’re just in respect of your ongoing investigation into alleged collusion with Russia and whether or not he has tried to obstruct justice. Think how many questions we have!

Well, you got his attention, which I assume was the purpose. “So disgraceful that the questions concerning the Russian Witch Hunt were ‘leaked’ to the media,” he raged on Twitter. (He talks to his Twitter followers all the time, of course, because that’s his best way to get round us.)

It’s possible the dry spell for you will be over soon. John Dowd resigned as Trump’s personal lawyer in March when he concluded that his advice not to meet you was likely to be ignored. Now Rudy Giuliani is there apparently taking a different tack and we are led to believe Trump is still minded to sit down with you. We aren’t sure because we can’t ask him.

If he does, you will have one big advantage over us. He will be bound to tell you the truth, assuming he is afraid of perjuring himself. That’s a really big deal, because in our experience he is not great at that. In a recent analysis, the Washington Post identified no fewer than 2,001 false or misleading claims Trump made in his first year in office. That computes to 5.6 a day.

What are we to do? Aides to Trump counter that his refusal to engage in the old rituals of the East Room back-and-forth with reporters is of no consequence. “President Trump is more accessible than most modern presidents and frequently takes questions from the press,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders noted just this week.

Of course, in a sense that’s true. Actually, many of us are suffering from Trump overload and are looking forward to him entering the DMZ on the Korean peninsula, his preferred venue for the upcoming summit with Kim Jong-un. Wifi access to get onto Twitter will be limited there.

Sanders is talking about all the times that Trump does cross paths with the White House press corps. And it is often. When he walks across the south lawn to the presidential chopper, they get to yell questions, which he may or may not respond to. It was the setting for example for his acknowledgement last month that, yes, he had just fired secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

There are the “photo sprays” that Huckabee Sanders sets up when reporters can crowd in with the cameras when they’re invited to record things like the start of a cabinet meeting or a sit-down beside a visiting foreign leader. Again, a bit of press hollering is tolerated.

Perhaps the nearest thing to the real thing are the joint press conferences he is obliged to hold with those world leaders. In the last few days, he has appeared alongside Emanuel Macron of France and Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria. And he gives interviews too. Last week, even the hosts on Fox and Friends, the morning show on his favourite cable channel, seemed uncomfortable when Trump phoned in for 30 minutes to get a whole barrow of stuff off his chest about everything from Mueller to the crash-and-burn of his nominee to be Veterans Affairs chief.

But none of this is the same as the president standing before the press corps for an hour or more to field whatever questions they lob at him. Generally only two or three US-based reporters get the microphone at those appearances with foreign leaders and Trump can – and regularly does – single out those he knows to be friendly to him. Otherwise, journalists travelling with the visiting head of government are picked. In the chaotic scrum of a ‘spray’ or the walk to Marine One or, indeed aboard Air Force One, it is easier than ever for Trump simply to ignore questions he doesn’t like or bat them away. “Stupid question,” was his response to one reporter asking him about the travails of his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, when he and and Macron posed for the cameras last week.

Fully-fledged news conferences, as we used to understand them, would be quite different. Eventually, he’d have to take questions from journalists he doesn’t favour, even from CNN and the New York Times, the two outlets he most regularly excoriates. Almost more importantly, in that setting, reporters usually get to ask follow-up questions when they are not satisfied with the answer given. And everything is live so if the presidents wiggles and waffles, the whole country can watch and score him accordingly.

Old-fashioned, maybe, but those press conferences, “help the public to gain a deeper understanding of a president’s thinking on an issue; show transparency and accountability; allow journalists to raise questions the public may be concerned about; and also allow a president to shape his message,” Margaret Taley, president of the White House Correspondents Association, noted this week.

Obviously Trump thinks he’s doing fine shaping his image all by himself, not least thanks to Twitter. As for the rest of it – transparency and accountability – there’s no evidence he cares.