We don't know who visited the White House officially, but there's an unauthorized list

The White House refuses to release its visitor logs, so Politico created a list of their own

By Matthew Rozsa

Staff Writer

Published May 9, 2017 4:27PM (EDT)

 (AP/Evan Vucci)
(AP/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump may still refuse to release his White House visitor logs, but that hasn't stopped some reporters from reconstructing a rough idea of who the president sees on a day-to-day basis.

An unofficial database created by Politico has determined that nearly two-thirds of the president's visitors (almost 63 percent) are both white and male, according to a report by Politico. Politico created this list by looking at White House schedules, pool reports filed by reporters who follow Trump every day and general news stories. It finds that, in addition to the domestic and foreign politicians one would expect a president to meet, Trump has also met with a large number of business executives (at least 270).

A more comprehensive breakdown of the report published by Politico found that the president seems to have met with far more business executives than Democratic politicians (92). They were also able to find nearly as many meetings between Trump and celebrities (44) as they were between Trump and foreign leaders (47). Perhaps most troublingly, it found that roughly four-out-of-five of Trump's meetings were with white people (only 20 percent were minorities) and that roughly four-out-of-five were with men (only 21 percent were women).

Of course, because the Trump White House has not released complete official logs, the information published by Politico is by its very nature incomplete and vulnerable to error (at least when it comes to determining demographic comparisons and similar statistics). At the same time, the fact that Trump's visitors have been overwhelmingly white, male, wealthy and Republican strongly suggests that he is surrounding himself with an echo chamber rather than a more diverse flow of ideas and information.

 

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By Matthew Rozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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