Donald Trump Is the TV Reality President – The New Yorker
It has long been known that Trump is a cable-news addict. Lately, trying to trace his angry tweets back to a particular news segment has turned into something of a parlor game.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP / GETTY
President Trump was up early on Monday morning, and, as usual, he was watching MSNBCs Morning Joe. How do we know this? Between six and seven A.M., Joe Scarborough, the shows co-host, discussed the reports that Steve Bannon, Trumps chief strategist, is the one directing policy in the White House. Scarborough showed the cover of this weeks Time magazine, which features Bannon along with the headline The Great Manipulator. Scarborough also showed a clip from Saturday Night Live, in which Bannon, presented as a skeleton in a black cloak, instructedTrump in the Oval Office before taking over his desk and consigning him to a smaller one.I dont know. Maybe Bannon is calling all the shots, Scarborough said. I still dont think he is.
We cant be sure that Trump was watching. But at 7:09 he tweeted this message: I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it. Some FAKE NEWS media, in order to marginalize, lies! As Bradd Jaffy, a news editor at NBC News, pointed out, also on Twitter, it certainly looked like the Morning Joe segment may have prompted this Presidential outburst. It has long been known that Trump is a cable-news addict. Lately, in media circles, trying to trace his angry tweets back to a particular news segment has turned into something of a parlor game.
In a juicy piece in Mondays Times, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush reported that Trumps cable-news viewing extends well beyond his breakfast hours. He recently upgraded the flat-screen TV in his private dining room so he can watch the news while eating lunch, the Times duo reported. Evidently, Trump also does a lot of viewing at night, when hes alone in the White Houses living quarters. With his wife, Melania, and young son, Barron, staying in New York, he is almost always by himself, sometimes in the protective presence of his imposing longtime aide and former security chief, Keith Schiller, the Times report said. When Mr. Trump is not watching television in his bathrobe or on his phone reaching out to old campaign hands and advisers, he will sometimes set off to explore the unfamiliar surroundings of his new home.
By any standard, this is a bit bizarre. Usually presidents are into their 2nd term before major papers depict them as a forlorn wraith skulking through the empty White House, the writer John Lingan tweeted. Later in the day, Trump would complain about how the Times covers him. But its portrayal of him as a President consumed by his own media coverage certainly rings true. Indeed, it helps explain the unnerving fusillade of tweets, declamations, and policy announcements that weve seen over the past couple of weeks.
Before Trump was inaugurated, it was sometimes said, based upon his old starring role on The Apprentice, that he would be a reality-TV President. In actuality, hes turned out to be a TV-reality Presidentan Oval Office occupant trapped in the world of cable news, where every minute brings breaking news, every issue is momentous, every hiccup is a crisis, and every criticism of the President is, in his own mind, a calumny. Rather than settling on a few policy themes and methodically going about the tricky business of advancing them through a political system in which the Presidents power is often limited, he has engaged in the TV pundits game of instant response and instant outrage. To try to shape the next days coverage, he also engages in instant policymaking.The result is chaoschaos that every day diminishes the aura of his Presidency and further enrages him.
Most politiciansthose who wish to retain their sanity, anywayfilter out much of the random noise that makes up the daily news cycle. President Obama used to tell people he didnt watch cable, except for ESPN. Going back further, Ronald and Nancy Reagan would sit through the evening news and then switch to an old movie.Margaret Thatcher took things to an extreme: she refused to watch the news or read the newspapers, which she held in disdain. To keep her up to date, her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, produced a daily digest of press clips, but he had to sit beside his boss to make sure she read at least some of them.
When theyre making policy decisions, many leadersObama and Thatcher includedget much of the information they rely on from personal briefings and briefing books. Trump, famously, said during his transition that he didnt need daily intelligence briefings. He also seems to beaverse to reading briefing books, or even the executive orders that he signs. In their latest Times piece, Haberman and Thrush strongly imply that Trump didnt realize he had appointed Bannon to a permanent spot on the National Security Councilan appointment that was subsequently criticized by a number of former national-security officials, who say Bannons presence risks politicizing the advice the council gives the President.
Evidently, Trump does read the Times sometimes,marking up articles with a black Sharpie and passing them on to aides with demands for a response. But much of his world view is shaped by what he sees on cable news.For anything but the vanity of the cable anchors, this cant be good.
It certainly isnt good for Trump himself, who seems to be getting more unhinged by the day. His Twitterrant over the weekend at a federal judgewho placed a temporary block on his anti-Muslim travel ban wasnt the considered behavior of someone acting in his own best interest. If anything, it seemed likely to persuade the members of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where the Trump Administration is seeking relief, to rally behind Judge James Robart, the George W. Bush appointee whom Trump described as a so-called judge.
Watching Trumps latest outbursts, I was reminded of something that Howard Stern, the shock jock who is a longtime friend of his, said last week, as the criticism of the President was mounting. Recalling that he hadnt wanted Trump to run for President, Stern said, This is something that is going to be very detrimental to his mental health . . . because he wants to be liked, he wants to be loved, he wants people to cheer for him. I dont think this is going to be a healthy experience for him.
If Stern is rightand other Trump associates have said similar thingsthe President needs to reverse, or at least modify, some of his divisive policies, particularly the travel ban, which, according to a new CNN poll, a majority of Americans disapprove of and regard as an effort to keep Muslims out of the United States. He also ought to cut down on his cable-news consumption, read some briefing books, and, rather than simply relying on Bannon, bring in some experts to walk him through issues and policies.But, of course, he is unlikely to do any of these things.
Even when Trump is down in Palm Beach, as he was this weekend, supposedly for a break, he will keep watching the box and railing about what he sees. On Monday morning, it seems, another thing that infuriated him was coverage of the unfavorable reaction to his travel ban. Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election, he tweeted. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting. By later in the morning, evidently, Trump had also caught up on the article by Haberman and Thrush, although whether he had read it or had simply seen it being discussed on TV wasnt clear. The failing @nytimes writestotal fiction concerning me, he complained. They have gotten it wrong for two years, and now are making up stories & sources!
And so it goes on.
View post:
Donald Trump Is the TV Reality President - The New Yorker