Trump Rules Out a Briefing-Room Pool but Says the White House Press May Be Moved

President Trump says he is not turning the White House press briefing room back into a swimming pool. But he says the reporters who work there may be getting new digs.

"There is a Fake News report out there that I am going to remove the White House Press Room and bring back the old Swimming Pool, which lies directly underneath," Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday morning. "Although I may move the Fake News to a less obnoxious location, the old swimming pool will never be brought back. I NEVER even thought to do such a stupid thing! Thank you for your attention to this matter."

In one post he knocked down the pool story and confirmed what Washington's press corps has feared for months: their front-row seat inside the West Wing isn't guaranteed.

Where the pool story came from

The rumor started with The New York Times. On Oct. 20, reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported that Trump pitched then-press secretary Karoline Leavitt in August on moving reporters out of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, calling it her "last legacy." The Times, citing three unnamed people, said Trump had raised it several times and preferred to bring back the indoor pool Franklin D. Roosevelt put in for polio therapy in 1933. Leavitt left the job Aug. 27, and the idea never moved forward on her watch.

Leavitt herself fed the buzz on Friday night. Asked about it on HBO's "Real Time," she told Bill Maher: "It was a swimming pool at one time. In fact, if you go down the stairs, underneath where the briefing room is, you can actually see the tile from where the pool used to be. So, he just maybe wants to restore it to all of its glory. I don't know if he'll do it, but he's been flirting with [the idea]." Maher, no Trump fan, shrugged at the whole fight: "I like the ballroom. America does need a ballroom."

Saturday's post settles the pool part. The room stays a room. Who sits in it is the open question.

Where reporters could land

The likeliest spot is the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the ornate building next door to the West Wing across West Executive Avenue, a closed-off street, the Times reported. It is still inside the White House gates. Think of it as moving a tenant from the living room to the guest house on the same lot: same property, just not underfoot.

White House communications director Steven Cheung didn't rule anything out. "America is rightly distrustful of the fake news media because they fabricate stories based off lies and sources who are not even privy to any type of information," he said. "All options remain on the table, and we will make an announcement when appropriate." No final decision has been made, CBS News reported.

Hillary Clinton wanted the pool first

Trump isn't the first to eye that space. Hillary Clinton wanted to turn the press quarters back into a swimming pool in 1993, according to former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos's memoir, the Times noted. The press howled, and the plan died.

Moving the press was also on the table in Trump's first term. Steve Bannon, then incoming chief strategist, pushed to get reporters out of the West Wing in 2016. "From the moment I arrived in the White House I believed it was a national security threat to have the press literally surround the Oval Office," Bannon told the Times this month. In January 2017, incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus publicly floated moving briefings to the Eisenhower building to make room for more reporters. The idea was shelved, and Trump later said: "The press went crazy, so I said, 'Let's not move it.'"

The press room itself is younger than most people think. Richard Nixon covered over Roosevelt's pool and opened the briefing room in 1970, and it was renamed for Reagan press secretary James Brady in 2000. Reporters have had workspace in the White House for more than a century, but that room has only been theirs for 56 years.

A fight that's been building

Saturday's post lands in the middle of Trump's bigger war with outlets he says peddle "fiction and lies." On Sept. 18 he banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House and their hard passes were pulled. Those outlets sued, and U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, blocked the ban on Oct. 13 while the case goes on. Even Kelly wrote that "no one should interpret the Court's decision to suggest that President Trump's concerns about accuracy and fairness in the media's reporting are unfounded." The administration is appealing.

The White House also has no press secretary right now. Katie Zacharia left after five days in the job earlier this month, USA Today reported, and Leavitt starts as a Fox News contributor Nov. 1.

So here is where it stands. The pool isn't coming back. The briefing room isn't going anywhere. The reporters might. And with Trump's history of saying out loud what he plans to do, the press corps would be wise to start measuring for curtains across the street.