The Trumpian White House has now given up almost entirely on the notion of daily press briefings. There was one—yes, one—Sarah Huckabee Sanders-led press briefing during the entire month of September; this follows only a dozen-ish briefings through the entire summer and tracks conspicuously with the eruption of more and more dire administration scandals.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders would like you to know that you're not to read anything in particular into this, however. Making a rare Sunday show appearance to defend the White House garbage fire—on Fox News, of course—she explained that what with all these new gadgets and gizmos and the ability of a toilet-sitting president to hate-tweet into the void whenever the mood strikes him, there is simply less need for a White House press secretary to appear on camera and explain to reporters just what the flying monkey hell is going on.
“The day that the briefing was initially created, the atmosphere was incredibly different and you didn’t have the same access and ways to communicate with the American public.” [...]“But I always think if you can hear directly from the president and the press has a chance to ask the President of the United States questions directly, that’s infinitely better than talking to me,” Sanders said. “We try to do that a lot and you’ve seen us do that a lot over the last three weeks, and that’s going to take the place of a press briefing when you can talk to the President of the United States.”
Having President Dementia blurt out falsehoods on a sporadic basis as the mood strikes him does not, in fact, seem like a proper substitute for a regular gathering in which the White House can clarify its baffling positions to reporters tasked specifically with parsing them out, but since Sanders is being rather transparently disingenuous here it doesn't seem productive to argue that point.
It's more reasonable to deduce that the press briefings began to be a net negative for the White House, and for Sarah Huckabee Sanders's continued employment in specific. We have long known that Trump himself would watch the briefings and get furious with briefers if he didn't feel they defended him properly; Sanders began to bow out of the press briefings after an early summer incident in which she apparently refused to defend the White House policy of placing refugee children in tent-city detention camps, a standoff which ended with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen flying to Washington to head that briefing personally.
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