Amid Donald Trump’s assault on the federal government, his showdowns with the courts and a trade war with China, one element of his Washington revolution has gone almost unnoticed.

The US president has quietly phased out his formal press conferences, once performed in front of US flags in the grandest of White House reception rooms, in favour of intimate back-and-forths with a handful of journalists in his gilded Oval Office.

“The old East Room press conference is a bit more stuffy and staged,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told The Telegraph, “and that’s not how Donald Trump rolls.”

He told aides that he saw little point in allowing cameras to film greetings with world leaders in the Oval Office, only to then do it again at a press conference an hour or two later.