US President Donald Trump participates in the swearing-in ceremony for Paul Atkins, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in the Oval Office of the White House on Washington, DC, April 22, 2025.

WASHINGTON — If you’re interested in finding Donald Trump’s precise words as he lied about his failed coup attempt in his Jan 20 remarks at the US Capitol soon after his inaugural speech, good luck with that.

Same with his Feb 12 thoughts in the Oval Office on how magnetism, in his view “a new theory,” doesn’t work on the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford.

Or his statements in the Feb 28 meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, berating the Ukrainian president and empathising with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin instead.

Ditto with his April 14 explanation of how well he is doing with “the cognitive” compared to previous occupants of the White House.

The self-proclaimed “most transparent” White House in history, as it turns out, has little interest in making the vast majority of Trump’s speeches and interactions with journalists readily accessible to the public whose taxes pay for their transcription, publishing just 29 transcripts of the 146 public remarks Trump made in his first 100 days in office.

Trump’s White House posted transcripts for only 11 of the 40 speeches in which Trump did not take questions from the media, and for only one of his six formal news conferences, according to a HuffPost review. And of the 98 media “availabilities” in which Trump took questions from reporters informally — a practice that his aides point to as proof of his great accessibility — only 15 of the transcripts have been made public.

Previous White Houses, going back decades, made all of the transcripts compiled by the non-political stenography office, staffed by career civil servants, available in printed form, via email and on the White House website, as a matter of course. Trump’s first-term staff also published all his remarks, with the exception of his speeches at rallies and fundraisers. Trump’s second-term White House stopped emailing transcripts to its press list just five days after taking office, and of late has largely stopped posting them on the website, too. As of Thursday morning, the last transcript from Trump on the site is from March 13.

Trump aides would not explain their decision to withhold 80% of the transcripts that have been prepared. White House communications director Steven Cheung, however, did insult HuffPost for asking the question:

“You must be truly fucking stupid if you think we’re not transparent. The president regularly does multiple press engagements per day and they are streamed live on multiple platforms. We’ve even granted low-level outlets like HuffPo [sic] additional access to events, because we’re so transparent. For anyone to think otherwise proves they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Stop beclowning yourself,” he wrote, demanding that his statement be published “in full.”

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said transcriptions of a president’s remarks have always been seen as historical records, not things to be politicised. “Making the words of the president readily available is part of the accountability obligation of the White House,” she said.

“The public has the right to know what the leader says ... It’s a mark of a democratic system,” she added, saying that she could not speculate as to why Trump is withholding most of his transcripts’ release. “Trying to figure out why this White House does what it does requires a skill far beyond mine.”

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's president, meets with US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office of the........

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