The Question and Its Aftermath

And so here we are, an article that starts off with the rare word “and.” But how else should this article have started—with the word “but”? Regardless, as awkward a beginning as this may be, it’s nothing compared to the kind of week I had. Oh. Wait, you’ve already heard…
So now that you’ve read all about Ami Magazine from the other sources, you get to read about Ami Magazine in Ami Magazine. And you get to see how much the rest of the media had missed.

Actually, I’m not sure where the story even begins. When time stands proverbially still, when a few consecutive days are nothing more than a sleepless blur fused together by dozens of interviews, hundreds of calls and thousands of messages, it becomes rather difficult to look back and identify the singular moment that had set everything into motion.

Could that moment have been last Tuesday, at the intersection of 17th and Penn, when I witnessed several police vehicles suddenly appear out of the ether and instantly reroute afternoon traffic so that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s motorcade could make its way over to Blair House, the official guesthouse of the president?

Could that moment have been on the following day, when President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu held a joint press conference and the president did not provide a satisfactory answer to an Israeli reporter’s question about rising anti-Semitism?
Could that moment have been later on that day, as the president escorted the prime minister to his vehicle and I got to ask them about how their meeting went; and the president responded that it was great and that everything was fantastic?

Perhaps. However, if we were to narrow it down to a particular minute, that minute would likely be Thursday morning, at 11:23 a.m. See, every night the White House correspondents receive a communication from the White House regarding what the president’s schedule can be expected to look like on the following day. It explains not only when and where the president will be, but it also denotes what time events take place, and whether they will be open to foreign/credentialed press, the regular White House press corps or only the pooled press. Whenever a change in plans takes place an updated email is sent out, sometimes mere minutes before a scheduled event. On this day the updated email would arrive at
11:23, informing us of a scheduling change effective immediately. In place of Press Secretary Sean Spicer holding his daily press briefing at 1:30, the president would be conducting his first solo press conference in the East Room at 12:30. By 11:50 we would all be expected to be at the Palm Room doors for a final gather, and from there we would enter through the North Portico and into the East Wing.

11:58—We receive the nod and proceed up the staircase and towards the entrance to the East Wing. “No pushing, no running,” an escort announces, as close to 200 reporters file up a single flight of stairs.

11:59—We’ve arrived. This is the third time I’m in the East Room this week for a press conference, but unlike the previous two (with the prime ministers of Israel and Canada; not together, though), this one is just the president himself (and the press, of course, not just the president by himself).

12:02—I find a seat in the third row. A difference between press conferences and briefings is that in briefings there are 49 designated seats (while everyone else stands in the back or in the aisles), while at press conferences there may be as many as three hundred seats (depending on whether there’s foreign media present) and each credentialed reporter can expect to have one seat. But the difference between joint press conferences and this one is that at joint press conferences the seats are prearranged while today there’s open seating, aside from the first row, which is unofficially reserved for the top TV channels, so that they can give live reports preceding and following the event.