A new report indicates that the President spends a considerable part of his day watching the news on cable television:
Around 5:30 each morning, President Trump wakes and tunes into the television in the White House’s master bedroom. He flips to CNN for news, moves to “Fox & Friends” for comfort and messaging ideas, and sometimes watches MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” because, friends suspect, it fires him up for the day.
Energized, infuriated — often a gumbo of both — Mr. Trump grabs his iPhone. Sometimes he tweets while propped on his pillow, according to aides. Other times he tweets from the den next door, watching another television. Less frequently, he makes his way up the hall to the ornate Treaty Room, sometimes dressed for the day, sometimes still in night clothes, where he begins his official and unofficial calls.
(…)
Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals. People close to him estimate that Mr. Trump spends at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as twice that, in front of a television, sometimes with the volume muted, marinating in the no-holds-barred wars of cable news and eager to fire back.
(…)
The ammunition for his Twitter war is television. No one touches the remote control except Mr. Trump and the technical support staff — at least that’s the rule. During meetings, the 60-inch screen mounted in the dining room may be muted, but Mr. Trump keeps an eye on scrolling headlines. What he misses he checks out later on what he calls his “Super TiVo,” a state-of-the-art system that records cable news.
Watching cable, he shares thoughts with anyone in the room, even the household staff he summons via a button for lunch or one of the dozen Diet Cokes he consumes each day.
(…)
The ammunition for his Twitter war is television. No one touches the remote control except Mr. Trump and the technical support staff — at least that’s the rule. During meetings, the 60-inch screen mounted in the dining room may be muted, but Mr. Trump keeps an eye on scrolling headlines. What he misses he checks out later on what he calls his “Super TiVo,” a state-of-the-art system that records cable news.
Watching cable, he shares thoughts with anyone in the room, even the household staff he summons via a button for lunch or one of the dozen Diet Cokes he consumes each day.
For his part, Trump claimed to reporters that he doesn’t watch much television:
Trump told reporters Saturday that he doesn’t watch much television while at the White House because he’s busy “reading documents.”
Believe it or not, even when I’m in Washington or New York, I do not watch much television,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “People that don’t know me, they like to say I watch television — people with fake sources. You know, fake reporters, fake sources.”
“But I don’t get to watch much television. Primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents. A lot,” Trump continued, speaking mainly to print reporters. “I actually read much more — I read you people much more than I watch television.”
Trump was responding to a question about Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) and whether he should continue running in the special election. Trump said he hasn’t “seen much about him” during his Asia trip.
“I haven’t been able to devote very much time to it,” Trump said, adding that he would “have further comment as we go down the road.”
Trump has previously insisted he has “very little time for watching TV,” though he often tweets about Fox News and CNN segments just after they air live.
Trump also had a 60-inch flat screen TV installed in his private White House dining room, according to Time magazine.
Trump’s claim that he doesn’t watch much television runs counter to numerous reports that have come out since Inauguration Day that indicate quite the opposite. Not only does he spend most of his morning watching one of the three cable news networks, but he is also known to spend his evenings watching the lineup of partisan opinion shows on Fox News Channel, especially Sean Hannity’s show at 10 pm Eastern and, when it was on the air, Bill O’Reilly’s show, which aired at 8 pm Eastern. Additionally, numerous articles have shown the relationship between Trump’s television habits and the contents of his Twitter feed. Quite frequently, Trump will tweet on a subject just moments after a report on the same subject had aired on Fox & Friends, Morning Joe, or CNN’s New Day. Also, he frequently retweets video clips from the feeds of these shows of reports that aired just moments before, or which he had tweeted about earlier in the morning. The same kind of correlation can be seen when Trump tweets in evening and the content of his feed ends up being similar to what was being discussed on the programs that he’s known to watch regularly. Given that, his claim that he doesn’t watch much television is an easily disproven lie.
The influence of Trump’s television viewing can also be seen in the fact that even his own staff has learned to use that habit to try to get messages to a President who seems immune to taking advice from anyone. Back in June, for example, a long time Trump ally named Christopher Ruddy appeared on PBS’s Newshour to discuss the fact that Trump was reportedly considering firing special counsel Robert Mueller. Ruddy spent much of his appearance explaining why he believed this would be a bad idea. At the time, many pundits wondered why Ruddy would disclose something like this. CNN’s Chris Cillizza speculated that Ruddy’s decision to was to send a message to Trump:
My (educated) guess is that during his visit to the White House on Monday, Ruddy heard that Trump was considering firing Mueller. Ruddy thought, rightly, that doing so would be an absolutely terrible political move. Rather than calling the President to tell him that, Ruddy took to a medium where he knew Trump would listen: TV.
We know from the 2016 campaign that Trump’s advisers and friends would use cable television appearances to send messages to Trump that he was simply not hearing in private conversations. For Trump, seeing things on TV somehow validated them, gave them an added level of importance that one-on-one communications lacked.
Yes, this is strange, unorthodox and unlike any past president. But, so is almost everything Trump has said and done since he became a candidate for president almost exactly two years ago today.
Those who successfully influence Trump meet him on his terms, not their own. That’s what Ruddy is doing here. Telling Trump his opinions through the TV filter. Because he knows that’s the only way to ensure Trump will hear it.
There’s something to be said about Cillizza’s hypothesis that speaks volumes about the kind of man we have in the White House today. The idea that the President of the United States can be influenced primarily by what he sees on cable news broadcasts is both bizarre and somewhat scary. It’s as if we’re living in a real-life version of Being There, the 1979 Peter Sellers film in which Sellers played a simple-minded man whose knowledge about the world was derived entirely from what he saw on television. In the film, Sellers’s character is suddenly forced into the outside world after his benefactor dies and, though, series of seemingly absurd events, ends up becoming a top adviser to the President of the United States. As the movie ends, the Sellers character is being seriously considered as the successor to that President. Now, we are living in a world where that character, Chance or “Chauncey” as he is known later in the movie, has actually become President. Trump’s cable news viewing habit is well-known, of course, and it can be seen in his Twitter habit, where his posts quite often correlate with what has just been aired on one of the three major cable news networks. It is an utterly bizarre world, but apparently completely normal for the Trump Era.
Peter Bart made a similar point in an article for Deadline back in March:
[While Trump’s every tweet fires up his opposition, Chauncey Gardiner rose to power in Being There through his benign comments about his garden. When he predicted “spring will bring new growth,” his comment was interpreted as a comforting metaphor for economic expansion. When he noted, “I don’t read newspapers, I watch TV,” supporters applauded his shrewd critique of newspaper journalism. When Chauncey exchanged friendly comments with the Russian ambassador at a state banquet, the meeting triggered infighting between the CIA and FBI because neither could figure out Chauncey’s background or motivation. None of his supporters seemed to understand that Chauncey was really just a gardener — “one who had rice pudding between his ears,” in the words of the kindly housekeeper who brought him up.
When Being There, based on a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, was produced in 1979, there was considerable debate about the film’s ending (the picture was funded by Lorimar Pictures, of which I was president). Hal Ashby, the gifted director, felt that his movie was a commentary on the state of American politics and hence argued that it would send the wrong message if Chauncey met a dire fate. Chaunceyism will live on, he believed (and I agreed). Hence the unforgettable ending: The last time we see Chauncey he is, to his surprise, walking on water.
As noted above, there have been numerous attempts by Chief of Staff John Kelly and others to break Trump of both his Twitter and television habits and, obviously, none of them have been successful. This is hardly surprising, of course. Trump is in his seventies and set in his ways, he’s not going to change his habts now just because he’s changed his job. Secondly, he’s the freaking President of the United States and if he wants to spend his time watching television, tweeting, and pressing the button that brings him Diet Cokes all day, there’s really not much that John Kelly, Invaka, or Jared are going to be able to do about that. Much like Trump’s Twitter habits, his television habits aren’t going to change no matter what anyone in the White House tries to do. All this means, of course, that we’re stuck with a President who gets his information primarily from cable “news” while regularly attacking the intelligence community that exists primarily to supply him with hopefully unbiased information and analysis. What that means for the future is anyone’s guess, but I don’t think it means anything good.
