Fox News Journalists On Trump’s 100 Days: ‘I Stopped Counting Days. I Count Hours Of Sleep’

For Fox News Senior White House Correspondents Peter Doocy and Jacqui Heinrich, the second inauguration of Donald Trump feels like yesterday and a long, long time ago. “It feels like that was years ago,” Doocy told me, reflecting on the dizzying pace of news from the new administration.

“I stopped counting days. I count hours of sleep that I can manage,” Heinrich told me, predicting that the next 100 days won’t be much different from the first. “I don’t think that we’re going to see a slower pace at all, but I do think that if you look at this period of time and you know, it’s sort of like an explosion of activity that has happened in a very, very short period of time, and on all different fronts.”

‘We are moving at a very fast pace, but I’m energized by that…that’s what keeps things interesting’

While the non-stop nature of covering the White House leaves little time for life outside of work, Heinrich says she’s good with that. “You know, I just really relish the opportunity to be a witness to history,” she told me. “I think that that’s just a blessing and a gift, that I am able to walk through the gate every day and talk about the issues that matter most to America. I mean, who gets to do that job?”

“I think that we are moving at a very fast pace, but I’m energized by that,” Heinrich said. “I think that that’s what keeps things interesting. I mean, I don’t stop working when I clock out, I’m watching, I’m reading, I’m listening. I’m in this job because that’s the kind of person I am, at work or not at work. I’m just always interested. I’m consuming all of it at all times. And so the fact that I can participate in talking about it and sharing it with the rest of the world is I find that to be very exciting thing. So I’m not worried about burnout.”

‘The best thing this White House is doing is letting live cameras into the Oval Office’

For an administration that began with a flood of executive orders, an aggressive effort to deport undocumented immigrants, and the launch of a global tariff war, little has happened outside of public view.

“I think the best thing this White House is doing is letting live cameras into the Oval Office. There was this mystery for years, and this is not just a Biden thing, but for many administrations, there’s always been a lot of mystery about what happens in the Oval Office,” Doocy told me, noting the number of key moments in the first 100 days–from the signing ceremonies to the hostile meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky–happened as news cameras rolled.

“If you can see the president and his top advisers sitting at the resolute desk talking about anything, it is just so interesting,” Doocy said. “And so I don’t think it matters what issue they’re talking about. I don’t think it matters how they’re talking about it. But just to get to see it live, I think has people paying a lot closer attention, and when they’re flipping through the channels or they’re streaming or however they’re getting their news, you’ll stop on that, because we haven’t seen it.”

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Doocy says after four years of covering President Biden, whose team kept reporters at a careful distance, Trump himself signaled the shift on day one when Trump moved into the Oval Office on inauguration day and took questions from reporters. After asking about policy, Doocy shifted to ask the president if he’d received a letter from Joe Biden.

“He took the time to have this dramatic, this dramatic reveal of the letter in the desk,” Doocy told me. “I think that’s the moment that I realized that things would be different: right then as he’s going for the letter, like he is actually going to let these moments play out.”

“It is just a look behind the curtain that sometimes you feel like you’re hearing stuff that you shouldn’t be hearing unless you are an elected president, right?” Doocy said.

‘A strong and effective spokesperson for the administration’

Both Doocy and Heinrich credited White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for giving journalists access–and answers. “She is, you know, easy to engage and accessible,” Heinrich told me. “And also, I think, a strong and effective spokesperson for the administration. I think that she does exactly what they would like their press secretary to do in projecting that kind of strength, of command. I also appreciate that her door is open and that she talks to everybody, is easy to get ahold of, and it’s not just with Fox.”

“She is doing a fine job,” Doocy said of Leavitt. “Her briefings are put together like a newscast where you get off the top a couple minutes of things that they want to highlight while they know that they are controlling the airwaves and while people are tuned in before the questions.”

“I get a sense from talking to her in the briefing room and outside the briefing room that she really has the ability to go into the Oval Office or call or text the president and get his opinion about anything almost any time,” Doocy told me. “And that is not a feeling that I got with the previous administration’s communications team, where the President was kind of siloed off, and there were multiple layers of people that you had to talk to and to try to feel them out on stuff, and most of the time, it would take so long that the news story was over by the time that they got to him.”

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That access has helped give both Doocy and Heinrich a sense of how the president and his advisors believe the first 100 days have gone, despite polls showing Trump’s approval ratings sinking–and more Americans giving his performance in office so far an ‘F’ grade than an ‘A.’

“I get a sense that (President Trump) thinks the immigration policy and the changes that they’ve put in place is a big hit with people,” Doocy said. “And that the tariff policy can be a big hit. It just hasn’t happened the way that they want it yet. And we know that Trump is hyper-focused on approval polls. They know that at the moment, the economic policy is not as as popular, but I have a sense that they will do whatever they have to do to make sure that his base is taken care of, which are people that don’t necessarily have a lot of money tied up in the stock market.”