Trump ‘Obsessed’ With Cable News Headlines And Journalist Tweets, Claims New Book
Dozens of books have already been published about the Trump administration, and — as detailed by a previous Inquisitr report — the president has never hesitated to either slam or recommend the books publicly, regardless of the fact that he is far from a voracious reader, according to White House insiders.
The latest book about the hectic Trump White House is campaign confidant Cliff Sims’ Team of Vipers, excerpts of which have been obtained by Axios.
According to the book, President Donald Trump, not one to shy away from bashing the media, is obsessed with cable news coverage of his administration, and with Twitter opinions expressed by prominent journalists and television pundits. Sims writes in his book on the Trump administration that the president is particularly fascinated by and obsessed with chyron (television captions, cable news headlines).
“People watch TV on mute, so it’s those words, those sometimes beautiful, sometimes nasty little words that matter,” Trump once reportedly told Sims.
“He consumed TV like the late Roger Ebert must have watched movies,” the former campaign confidant recounted for Axios.
But the president’s obsession with television, in Sims’ experience, has made a significant impact on White House dynamics. Since Trump is extremely obsessed with news coverage and how he is perceived by the media, according to the former campaign confidant, he often asks aides to take screenshots of cable news headlines and Twitter messages from prominent journalists and pundits.
“When the President would deliver a speech somewhere outside of D.C., the research team would take screenshots of all the chyrons that aired while he was speaking. Then, adding those images to headlines and tweets from influential reporters and pundits, they would race to print out a packet before Trump made it back to the White House.”
According to Axios, Sims’ books paints Donald Trump as an avid TV watcher who sees himself not only as media star, but as a critic, director, and producer, a person knowledgeable enough about the media industry to critique every aspect of it.
None of Sims’ claims come as a surprise, given that the media has extensively reported on Donald Trump’s obsession with television and public perception of his presidency.
For all his media bashing, President Trump sees the White House as the greatest show on earth and that this fixation even extends to the chyrons on cable news.https://t.co/hNKRSBanJi
— Axios (@axios) January 20, 2019
According to a 2018 New York Times report, Trump spends at least four hours a day watching television. According to NYT‘s White House sources, on some days, the president watches up to eight hours of TV. Fox & Friends is reportedly the president’s favorite television show, and he is widely known to be an avid watcher of a number of Fox News programs.
