Tom Hanks has delivered an espresso machine to the White House press corps to provide a caffeinated boost to their efforts in the “good fight for truth”.
The gesture continues a long-running tradition by Hanks, who first bestowed a new coffee machine for the journalists covering the White House in 2004, during George W. Bush’s presidency.
This time, the machine was accompanied by a note, typed on one of Hank’s beloved typewriters, which read: “To The White House Press Corps, Keep up the good fight for Truth, Justice and the American way. Especially for the Truth part.”
BREAKING: White House press corps receives brand-new espresso machine from @tomhanks. Come for the coffee... stay for his note. 👇 pic.twitter.com/cirbLKHEt0
— Peter Alexander (@PeterAlexander) March 2, 2017
The note also included a cartoon drawing of American soldiers, captioned: “Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners.”
Donald Trump’s administration has had a fraught relationship with media in its short lifespan. Last week, the White House prevented reporters from outlets including the Guardian, the New York Times, and CNN from attending an off-camera press briefing with press secretary Sean Spicer.
Hanks, who publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton, has previously referred to Trump as “a self-involved gasbag” but said recently that “America has been in worse places” and was still “the greatest country in the world”.
The coffee machine replaces one that Hanks bought in 2010, after he noticed that the “poor slobs of the fourth estate” had left his original gift from 2004 in a sorry state from overuse.
“You know, you are supposed to clean this after every use,” he reportedly told the journalists.
The note is also a nod to Hanks’s lifelong fascination with typewriters, which he collects. His passion for the machines is the subject of his debut book, Uncommon Type, to be released in October, a collection of stories set around typewriters.
He once said of the machines that “each one stamps into paper a permanent trail of imagination through keys, hammers, cloth and dye – a softer version of chiselling words into stone”.
