He called on Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, to repeat an argument he had made earlier in the day on television — that climate change was not to blame for the deadly blazes. “Ryan was saying it’s not a global warming thing, it’s a management situation,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Zinke obliged, blaming Canadian lumber imports — one of Mr. Trump’s favorite trade villains — for what he called displacing American-grown lumber on the market, leaving fallen trees to rot and become combustible. “So ridiculous,” Mr. Trump said with a nod.
On a day when he had tweeted that the “FAKE NEWS MEDIA IS THE OPPOSITION PARTY” and as hundreds of newspapers, including The New York Times, ran editorials condemning his attacks as undermining press freedoms, Mr. Trump held out his live, 57-minute cabinet meeting as a counterpoint.
“If you’d like, you can stay,” Mr. Trump told the small group of reporters representing the White House press corps at the meeting. “Or if you’d like, you can also leave. Don’t forget: freedom of the press!”
The president did make some news of his own. At one point, he appeared to confirm a disputed account of a deal for Turkey to release an American pastor, Andrew Brunson, in exchange for Washington’s help in freeing a Turkish woman detained in Israel on charges of funding Hamas.
The Turkish woman was freed, but Mr. Brunson remains under house arrest in Turkey. The deal was reported widely, but disputed privately by some American officials, and White House and State Department officials have refused to publicly discuss it.
The president, however, was more than happy to hold forth.
“We got somebody out for him,” Mr. Trump said, apparently referring to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. “He needed help getting somebody out of someplace; they came out. They want to hold our wonderful pastor. Not fair. Not right.”
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