The White House hasn’t lost control of the narrative surrounding President Donald Trump and Russia, because it never had control in the first place. The fallout from the past few days following Trump’s explosive press conference with Vladimir Putin has further exposed the deficiencies in the administration’s messaging capabilities, as the cleanup effort has been badly outmatched by new developments and the president’s muddled statements.
The week began with Trump’s session with Putin in Helsinki—a two-hour-long meeting with only translators and the two principals in the room. Trump finished the meeting by standing next to Putin at a press conference and rejecting his own intelligence agencies’ assessment that the Russians meddled in the 2016 election. After almost 24 hours of backlash, during which administration officials largely went mum, Trump ended up backtracking, reading a prepared statement in which he said that he accepts the intelligence community’s findings—though he quickly undercut his own claim.
