Snow fell gently on the White House grounds.

Inside the West Wing offices, low-level communications staffers were talking about Champ and Major, President Joe Biden’s two German shepherds, who apparently have better access to the White House than most humans.

“They can come and go as they want,” a Secret Service agent told me with a smile. “As long as I don’t have to clean up after them.”

After two weeks in the White House, the Biden administration is settling in and, according to Press Secretary Jen Psaki in a Tuesday briefing, hoping to undo the “immoral” actions of the previous administration.

Me? I’m bringing doggy treats for Champ and Major.

Getting the coronavirus under control is the Biden administration’s top-priority job, but one cannot forget all the other fires Biden must put out, all the craters he must fill after Trump’s four years of digging holes. It’s a giant land reclamation project to salvage the Constitution and give the United States a decent chance of once again living up to its ideals. “I’m not making new law, I’m eliminating bad policy,” Biden told the White House press pool Tuesday evening after signing several executive orders.

He’s got a lot of work ahead of him. The Justice Department is in disarray. Congress is in a shambles. The economy is suffering. Education is hurting. You can’t find a decent (Covid-safe) rock-’n’-roll-playing roadside bar. And QAnon supporters believe (among other insanities) that reptiles from the Andromeda galaxy have infiltrated U.S. leadership.

After Trump’s abysmal four-year romp through the swamp, the Biden administration is claiming the high road. But two weeks in, troubles are emerging. “It’s nice to turn down the temperature and stop lying to us,” a reporter said in the White House basement after Psaki’s Tuesday press briefing. “But they have to do better.”

On Monday Psaki made a reference in her daily briefing to “conservative Twitter,” causing a portion of right-wing Twitter to go nuts. Then on Tuesday Twitter’s progressive side lit up after Psaki gave a prickly response to a question from Politico reporter Anita Kumar.

Yet in bringing back the White House daily briefing, Psaki has so far had a relatively painless experience. Reporters have been so relieved to simply have a daily briefing—and to not be threatened, insulted or called “fake news” or “the enemy of the people”—that they’ve given Psaki an easy time. She also benefits, as her predecessor Kayleigh McEnany did, from dealing with just 14 reporters in the briefing room thanks to Covid precautions, instead of the 75 or more that would be present in normal times. The pandemic has reduced the press presence and given Psaki an enormous home-field advantage.

Joe Lockhart, former press secretary for President Bill Clinton, once explained to me how difficult it can be when several reporters “lock in on” the press secretary during a briefing. Following each other’s line of questioning and drilling down, reporters can expose a topic the press secretary is ill-prepared to handle.

Psaki has not had that problem, and she’s smarter than McEnany at playing to the crowd. She has been engaging, at least until Tuesday, and the press has been preoccupied with “housekeeping” questions, settling for her tactic of “circling back” to us on difficult issues. Psaki is less abrasive than McEnany (though that’s not saying much; coarse sandpaper is less abrasive than the Trump administration), but cracks are emerging.

On an off-the-record call with White House Correspondents’ Association members, Psaki encouraged reporters to give her a heads-up if they planned to ask something difficult, according to the Daily Beast. “If you’re a reporter with a tough question for the White House press secretary, Joe Biden’s staff wouldn’t mind knowing about it in advance,” Maxwell Tani reported.

That seems innocuous on its face. Reporters often ask questions about complex issues ahead of time so they can get a well-informed answer. There’s nothing wrong with that. And if Psaki wants to know questions ahead of time in order to research the answer, that can be okay too. But if she will allow only questions she has prepared answers to ahead of time, or if she won’t call on journalists because she doesn’t want to address the question she knows is coming, then that’s a problem.

The best questions, or at least those I’ve appreciated the most, are those formulated in real time, either prompted by the press secretary’s answers or by following up on other reporters’ questions. Though reporters come to briefings prepared with several questions, sometimes we don’t know what the best question will be until we hear what’s going on.

Either way, Psaki said her comments in the Zoom call had been misconstrued. (Probably best in the future if she refrain from commenting on such tricky matters over Zoom; the potential to be misunderstood is just too great.)

“Our goal is to make the daily briefing as useful and informative as possible for both reporters and the public,” a White House spokesperson told the Daily Beast. “Part of meeting that objective means regularly engaging with the reporters who will be in the briefing room to understand how the White House can be most helpful in getting them the information they need. That two-way conversation is an important part of keeping the American people updated about how government is serving them.” Psaki’s deputy press secretary reiterated this statement to me when I asked for an explanation.

Many reporters are willing to take Psaki at face value for now, but grumblings already exist regarding the ultra-restrictive Covid policies for reporters covering the White House. Given Psaki’s spiky response to Kumar and her snarky reply to a Bloomberg reporter’s query about Space Force, some in the press see Psaki’s grace period as coming to a close. On Wednesday Psaki was asked if she would apologize to members of Space Force for her seemingly flippant treatment of the newest branch of the armed services—a definite first for the Biden administration.

“I think the honeymoon is definitely over,” one reporter told me after Tuesday’s briefing. “At least it feels like it. I don’t even know what was said today. We weren’t lied to or attacked, but it’s hard to see what was said in the briefing that was productive. She was snarky.”

Granted, this remains a quality problem to have. To give some perspective, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham recently said on Fox News that if impeachment proceedings continue, they might as well call in the FBI. (Do it. Call in the FBI. Prosecute everyone.)

The press spent the past four years fighting for facts to be heard in an environment where bad fiction, sedition and insurrection were king. There is little doubt that Democrats will get credit from most of us, if not a temporary hall pass, just for not being batshit nuts.

Former president Trump still refuses to admit he’s a former president. In the run-up to his Senate trial, he is arguing he can’t be impeached because he’s out of office and what he said prior to the Capitol insurrection is protected speech. When he was in office he said he couldn’t be prosecuted because he was in office; now the goalposts have moved, and he says he can’t be prosecuted because he’s out of office.

Joe Biden could sell off the Lincoln Bedroom’s furnishings or let Champ and Major take a dump in the Oval Office and most of the country would give him a pass, thanks to what Trump did as president. That’s a problem. With the bar set so low, many are willing to accept a lot of bad behavior. Little can be as nerve-wracking as living under President Trump.

Biden fans are cheering for Psaki on social media—comments include “She’s dynamite” and “What a breath of fresh air—a real briefing.” But not everyone is happy. Questions have arisen about the extent of Psaki’s actual access to the president, though she told me Tuesday afternoon she talks to him “nearly every day.” And while she sticks to the administration’s talking points without lying or having a tantrum like a hysterical toddler—hallmarks of Trump’s last press secretary—that is still a far cry from providing the depth of information the people of the country need.

Somewhere in the White House basement, a fan whirred on Tuesday afternoon. The sound was something like a rusty gate or a coffin opening slowly—perhaps Trump was still around? It’s hard to conceive of a White House in which he isn’t yelling at his chief of staff about the thermostat, or advising Americans to ingest bleach, or screaming at the press, calling us liars, thieves, rogues and enemies of the people.

The White House press corps is haunted by the former president. We suffer from PTSD from having to cover Trump over the past four years. A reprieve from that, in conjunction with the affable nature of the new press secretary, is why the press corps has gone easy on Psaki and the administration in the first two weeks of Biden’s term.

But the trauma of Trump will fade. And if Biden’s communication team doesn’t get better at what they do, they’re in for a rude awakening.