TV often sets tone for Trump's day as he fights for respect
WASHINGTON — Around 5:30 each morning, President Donald 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 both — 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 nightclothes, where he begins his official and unofficial calls.
As he ends his first year in office, Trump is redefining what it means to be president. He sees the highest office in the land much as he did the night of his stunning victory over Hillary Clinton — as a prize he must fight to protect every waking moment, and Twitter is his Excalibur. Despite all his bluster, he views himself less as a titan dominating the world stage than a maligned outsider engaged in a struggle to be taken seriously, according to interviews with 60 advisers, associates, friends and members of Congress.
For other presidents, every day is a test of how to lead a country, not just a faction, balancing competing interests. For Trump, every day is an hour-by-hour battle for self-preservation. He still relitigates last year’s election, convinced that the investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, into Russia’s interference is a plot to delegitimize him.
People close to him Reaction to Trump's first year from Ohioans / B1 estimate that 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 noholds-barred wars of cable news and eager to fire back.
“He feels like there’s an effort to undermine his election and that collusion allegations are unfounded,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who has spent more time with the president than most lawmakers. “He believes passionately that the liberal left and the media are out to destroy him. The way he got here is fighting back and counterpunching.
“The problem he’s going to face,” Graham added, “is there’s a difference between running for the office and being president. You’ve got to find that sweet spot between being a fighter and being president.”
Trump is more unpopular than any of his modern predecessors at this point in his tenure — just 32 percent approved of his performance in the latest Pew Research Center poll — yet he dominates the landscape like no other.
Trump is on the verge of finally prevailing in his efforts to cut taxes and reverse part of his predecessor’s health-care program. While much of what he has promised remains undone, he has made significant progress in his goal of rolling back business and environmental regulations. The growing economy he inherited continues to improve. His partial travel ban on mainly Muslim countries has finally taken effect.
Jared Kushner, his son-inlaw and senior adviser, has told associates that Trump, deeply set in his ways at 71, will never change. Rather, he predicted, Trump will bend, and possibly break, the office to his will.
That has proved half true. Trump, so far, has arguably wrestled the presidency to a draw.
‘ Time to think’
As White House chief of staff, John Kelly, a retired four-star general, has labored 14-hour days to impose discipline on a chaotic operation — with mixed success.
The Oval Office once had a rush-hour feel, with a constant stream of aides and visitors stopping by. The door is now mostly closed.
The pace of meetings has increased. Beyond Kelly and Kushner, they often include Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, national security adviser; Ivanka Trump, one of the president’s daughters and a senior adviser; Hope Hicks, communications director; Robert Porter, staff secretary; and Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor.
Trump has made significant concessions and craves the approval of Kelly, whom he sees as a peer, people close to Trump said.
He calls Kelly up to a dozen times a day to ask about his schedule or seek policy advice, according to people who have spoken with the president. The new system gives him “time to think,”
‘I don’t watch much’
The ammunition for Trump’s Twitter war is television. No one touches the remote control except 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 Trump keeps an eye on scrolling headlines. What he misses he checks out later on what he calls his “Super TiVo,” a state-ofthe-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.
But he is leery of being seen as tube-glued — a perception that reinforces the criticism that he is not taking the job seriously. On his recent trip to Asia, the president was told of a list of 51 factchecking questions for this article, including one about his prodigious televisionwatching habits. Instead of responding through an aide, he delivered a broadside on his viewing habits to reporters on Air Force One.
“I do not watch much television,” he insisted. “I know they like to say — 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.”
But Trump is still delighted when he sees his name in the headlines. One former top adviser said Trump grew uncomfortable after two or three days of peace and could not handle watching the news without seeing himself on it.
During the morning, aides
monitor “Fox & Friends” live or through a transcription service in much the way commodities traders might keep tabs on market futures to predict the direction of their day.
If someone on the show says something memorable and Trump does not immediately tweet about it, the president’s staff knows he may be saving Fox News for later viewing on his recorder and instead watching MSNBC or CNN live — meaning he is likely to be in a foul mood to start the day.
Still, the image of Trump in a constant rage belies a deeper complexity.
“He is very aware that he is only the 45th person to hold that job,” Conway said. “The job has changed him a bit, and he has changed the job. His time as president has revealed other, more affable and accessible, parts and pieces of him that may have been hidden from view during a rough-and-tumble primary.”
Few get to see those other parts and pieces. In private moments with the families of appointees in the Oval Office, the president engages with children in a softer tone than he takes in public, and he specifically asked that the children of the White House press corps be invited in as they visited on Halloween.
Only occasionally does Trump let slip his mask of unreflective invincibility. During a meeting with Republican senators, he discussed in emotional terms the opioid crisis and the dangers of addiction, recounting his brother’s struggle with alcohol.
According to a senator and an aide, the president asked puckishly, “Aren’t you glad I don’t drink?”
Information consumption
As the president increasingly recognizes how much Congress controls his fate, Marc Short, legislative affairs director, has sought to educate him by appealing to Trump’s tendency to view issues in terms of personality, compiling one-page profiles of legislators for him.
While Trump is no policy wonk — “nobody knew that health care could be so complicated,” he famously said at one point — he has
shown more comfort with the details of his tax-cutting legislation. And aides said he has become more attentive during daily intelligence briefings thanks to pithy presentations by Mike Pompeo, CIA director, and a deeper concern about the North Korea situation than his tweets suggest.
“At first, there was a thread of being an impostor that may have been in his mind,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the House minority leader. “He’s overcome that by now. The bigger problem, the thing people need to understand, is that he was utterly unprepared for this. It would be like you or me going into a room and being asked to perform brain surgery. When you have a lack of knowledge as great as his, it can be bewildering.”
Graham, once a fierce critic and now increasingly an ally, said Trump is adjusting. But Graham added that at this point in Trump’s presidency, “everything’s possible, from complete disaster to a home run.”
In almost all of the interviews, Trump’s associates raised questions about his capacity and willingness to differentiate bad information from something that is true.
Even after a year of official briefings and access to the best minds of the federal government, Trump is
skeptical of anything that does not come from inside his bubble.
Other aides bemoan his tenuous grasp of facts, jack-rabbit attention span and propensity for conspiracy theories.
Trump is an avid newspaper reader who still marks up a half-dozen papers with comments in black Sharpie pen, but former adviser Steve Bannon has told allies that Trump only “reads to reinforce.” Trump’s insistence on defining his own reality — his repeated claims, for example, that he actually won the popular vote — is immutable and has had a “numbing effect” on people who work with him, said Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter on “The Art of the Deal.”
“He wears you down,” Schwartz said.
In recent weeks, Trump’s friends have noticed a different pitch, acknowledging that many aides and even his own relatives could be hurt by Mueller’s investigation. As for himself, he has adopted a surprisingly fatalistic attitude, according to several people he speaks with regularly.
“It’s life,” he said of the investigation.
From there it is off to bed for what usually amounts to five or six hours of sleep. Then the television will be blaring again, he will reach for his iPhone and the battle will begin anew.