The Guardian:
A new book depicts Donald Trump as a media obsessive who measures his staff’s loyalty by how well they defended him on television. But despite his Twitter habit, he rarely looks at the web.
A copy of Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War Over the Truth by Howard Kurtz, a host and media critic on the president’s favored Fox News network, was obtained by the Guardian ahead of its publication on Monday.
It tells of a period in which Trump would phone his son-in-law Jared Kushner every morning and ask: “Did you read the fucking New York Times?” Kushner assured him the paper did not matter.
The president, Kurtz writes, begins his day with four newspapers: the Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. He watches the daily White House press briefing and uses the TiVo personal video recorder to catch up on cable shows he has missed. Communications director Hope Hicks, who has Google alerts set up for key names, sometimes shows him clips on her phone.
His sensitivity to media coverage is unique in US presidential history. Kurtz writes: “Sometimes, when Trump saw guests ably defending him, he asked [then press secretary] Sean Spicer to call them and say the president thought they did a good job. When Trump saw what he deemed unfair reporting or punditry, he used Twitter to trash the offending show or network. And occasionally he tweeted something favorable about Fox & Friends or Hannity.”
Trump now has more than 47m Twitter followers and Kurtz details how his tweets on policy leave his staff scrambling. The 71-year-old billionaire spends little time online, “but if staffers handed him printouts of articles they thought important, he read them”.
This book will be harder for the *resident to denounce than Michael Wolff's. Kurtz has impeccable conservative cred: he works for Fox News, and The Daily Beast fired him in 2013 for falsehood-based attacks on a gay professional athlete.
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