White House Briefing Room Podium Left Bracing For Impact After Trump Says UFC Offer Was Only A Joke

WASHINGTON—The White House briefing-room podium spent the weekend tightening its own bolts after PBS NewsHour, citing the Associated Press, reported that President Donald Trump posted Saturday from his Florida golf club that he had offered the press secretary job to UFC boss Dana White. According to the same reporting, the lectern has had no regular occupant since Karoline Leavitt left at the end of August. "It asked me for a cross-brace and a second microphone, for leverage," said Lyle Brannock, 61, a furniture-care contractor from Silver Spring, MD.

The podium's alarm deepened on reports that the post asked White to bring several UFC fighters along as assistants, which the lectern took to mean "multiple occupants, possibly simultaneous." Denise Okafor, a load engineer at the Georgetown Institute for Lectern Integrity, said the unit was rated for "one spokesperson and a binder, not a corner team." The podium responded by quietly reinforcing its left flank.

On Sunday, according to AP, Trump told reporters in Florida the offer was only a joke and said White seemed to like the idea. "In standard diplomatic usage, a joke the other party enjoys is a memorandum of understanding with the safety off," said Ambrose Thale, a protocol consultant with the Geneva Council on Ceremonial Usage. Thale advised the lectern to hold a posture of "cordial readiness," which he defined as "every bolt tight, but smiling."

The strain grew after AP reported that White had shared on Instagram an image of himself behind the podium, captioned as moving on to the next chapter. Thale said that in protocol terms, posing with a host's furniture amounts to the formal presentation of credentials. The podium said nobody had asked it to countersign anything and requested that this be entered into the record.

The podium then convened an emergency review covering two questions: whether its presidential seal should stay mounted for gravitas or come off for safety, and AP's report that Republicans had lost control of both chambers of Congress in Tuesday's midterms. Both matters were placed on a single agenda line and given eleven minutes each. The seal asked to be consulted first, which Thale translated as "the seal is furious."

The podium has since joined the Lectern Resilience Collective, which meets Thursdays in a hotel basement in Arlington, VA. There, a retired ballroom lectern described surviving 340 wedding toasts and one best man who leaned. "You never really unbrace," the ballroom lectern said. "You just learn to stand there."

At press time, the podium had been seen practicing a slight lean-back posture ahead of Monday, when AP reported White said he planned to meet Trump at the White House, a meeting the lectern described as "either a visit or a weigh-in."