During the years of his presidency, when controversy and investigations into his behavior began to increase, television became a less reliable safe space. Broadcast networks, which have been put under pressure to be more aggressive in their approach to him and his assistants, have asked more difficult questions. With the exception of Fox News, cable networks that rushed him throughout 2016 and hastened the early stages of his presidency have hampered, and in particular, slashed the delivery of his live performances.
The presidential transition
And his adventures in the White House Information Room have generally not gone well, revealing the limits of his understanding of policies or current events. One Trump adviser was blunt and said that the president does not like most aspects of his job, and that includes being asked questions for which he does not know the answers.
When Mr. Trump went to the information hall in the spring to discuss the coronavirus, advisers said he liked the visual aspects of his actions, but not the reality of back and forth that led to his condemnation and mockery. does not become his dangerous statements about fighting the virus with bleach and light and his factual allegations about everything going better.
Twitter became a stage where he could get stricter right.
It was telling that Mr. Throughout his tenure, Trump has chosen his @realdonaldtrump account and not his official @Potus account. He understood the power to build his personal brand and keep it separate from his official duties as president. Twitter has given him a unique outlet to express himself as he is, unfiltered by the norms of the presidency.
He flips through his own Twitter feed and looks at the answers for new topics to throw out. He studied the Twitter trend lists as signs of where the discourse was headed.
Somehow television became the medium through which he could see the consequences of his tweets.
The television in his alcove dining room outside the Oval Office was usually on in the background, catnip for his brief attention. He devoured much of his information through it and watched the coverage of his tweets.
Trump’s White House staffers said he likes to tweet and then see how the chyrons on cable news channels are changing rapidly. For a septuagener whose closest allies and associates often displayed the emotional development of a predecessor, and for whom attention was a narcotic, the immediate gratification of his tweets was difficult to match.