Death of the Trump Scoop

An 'act-of-God' Signal scoop and an Epstein omertà: proof the Trump White House doesn’t leak anymore.

Reporting for ABC News as a White House Correspondent during Trump's first term.

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

A few weeks ago in Washington, over lunches, dinners, and too many drinks, as I tried to get a feel for how the epicenter of power has shifted, one theme kept surfacing: the death of the Trump scoop.

In 2016, when I first landed on the White House beat for POLITICO, I was part of a scrappy crew of reporters, the farm team for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. I moved on to ABC News as a White House Correspondent, bounced back through POLITICO and Puck, and now I’ve settled as an independent journalist. But I still remember the intensity of that competition. The fight for the Trump scoop was savage.

I’d just come back from Europe as a foreign correspondent, and before that I’d cut my teeth at the New York Post, so I wasn’t prepared for the D.C. press corps. Up close, I watched reporters undercut each other with sources, jockey for bylines, and claw for an edge. It was gross, but it was also the story. The Trump administration thrived on disarray: the firings, the betrayals, the “who’s up, who’s down.” I remember my first Valentine’s Day on the beat being ruined when National Security Advisor Mike Flynn was fired. Nights were spent sipping wine in the Trump Hotel lobby with administration officials or slipping into liberal haunts in Shaw or Logan Circle, neighborhoods made chic during the Obama years, with my best sources just hoping not to be spotted.

The Trump Hotel is gone now. Reporters loiter at the SoHo House transplant The Ned, hoping to grab Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. And Donald Trump Jr. is launching his own members-only club in Georgetown, “The Executive Branch,” with a $500,000 price tag clearly designed to keep reporters out.

Back then, the White House was a leaky sieve because the stories were about people, and their reputations were on the line. It was juicy, it was drama, and the high-minded could argue it had policy implications. Every staffer wanted to prove they were the one “saving America from Trump,” as they dished on the chaos inside. The brutal firings were legendary: Chief of Staff Reince Priebus dumped by tweet on the tarmac, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson fired on the toilet in Africa. Reporters had betting pools on which aide would survive the week in Trump’s version of Squid Games. It made for great copy. Trump books flew off shelves, cable news ratings soared, newspapers revived.

This time it feels different. Reporters are burnt out and so is the audience. Maybe because we’re drowning in news. POLITICO’s Zack Stanton summed up just last week:

“Trump told women not to take Tylenol during pregnancy… His budget office floated using a shutdown as a pretext for mass firings… He spoke at the U.N… met Arab leaders about peace… announced a major shift on Ukraine… his FCC tried to jawbone Disney into dropping Jimmy Kimmel… his DOJ criminally charged James Comey… ordered U.S. attorney’s offices to draft plans to investigate a Soros group… signed an executive order to keep TikTok alive… plus a dozen other gigantic stories.”

Do you even remember it?

As former Trump administration official Matthew Bartlett put it: “The first administration was a soap opera, this is shock therapy.”

And that shift matters. With no leakers, Trump gets to script the story exactly how he wants it and everyone else is just catching up as his grip on power grows.

Reporters say scoops are harder to land. Every major moment plays out on Truth Social or vanishes in five minutes under the weight of the next democracy-busting announcement.

“You’ve got violence, foreign policy upheaval, the National Guard, Charlie Kirk assassination,” Bartlett said. “A scoop on infighting at the White House is trivial.”

Plus, Trump is literally a phone call away. Everyone has his number. He’ll pick up at dawn or at 11 p.m., when I last caught him. Which means any reporter can land an exclusive any day of the week.

The rare scoop, like Rachael Bade’s report on Bessent’s threat to punch housing finance executive Bill Pulte “in the fucking face,” made a ripple for a few hours. That fight circulated because it had Page Six energy. Now it’s just another leak, maybe even part of Bessent’s own strategy, it is his second fight story.

“The last real big scoop was an act of God,” one White House reporter told me, describing how The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg stumbled into a Signal chat where Trump’s top brass were casually sharing classified info on a Yemen raid alongside emojis. It carried cable news for days, but National Security Advisor Mike Waltz wasn’t even fired, just demoted months later to U.N. ambassador for being the one who accidentally added Goldberg.

What used to cause days of outrage, like Jim Acosta’s press pass being yanked or Kaitlan Collins being banned from a presser, now happens daily, and quietly. A reporter is told they’re no longer on the pool list. Networks don’t want the fights to spill into public view. They’re afraid of losing licenses, distribution, advertisers, or the 50 percent of the country that isn’t watching them anyway. Corporates are under siege, as The New York Times’ Noam Scheiber wrote: hit with frivolous lawsuits, obsessed with share price, unwilling to defend one another against Trump’s power grabs.

Instead, the chatter in D.C. is whether NYT stars Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are saving all their scoops for their book.

One story does terrify Trump world: Jeffrey Epstein. Inside the White House, there’s a code of omertà: “Don’t ask about it,” one former Trump official told me.

Like Obama’s second term, when only the diehard loyalists stuck around so there were fewer leaks, Trump’s second go-round feels locked down too.

“This is the final [Trump] administration,” the former official said. “They’re not going anywhere.”

That loyalty makes leaking more dangerous, so sources are afraid to even be seen with journalists.

Even Trump has changed. After years of craving a flattering headline in the Times, he’s moved on, recognizing the value of podcasts after they carried him in the 2024 election. If he doesn’t like the coverage, he just sues. He’s already fired off a $15 billion lawsuit against the Times for unflattering press and $10 billion against the Wall Street Journal for breaking a story about his bête noire Epstein, a story that didn’t even originate with their White House reporters.

“Trump used to care about the papers,” the former aide explained. “Now they just go to Breitbart or the Daily Caller. If you want to know what the administration is up to, read [Breitbart editor] Matt Boyle. They just put it all out there. It’s messy. There’s no process.”