In addition to the nuggets about the disturbing closeness of Sean Hannity to Donald Trump, Olivia Nuzzi’s must-read article reveals that Trump’s aides manipulated him into limiting his news diet to Fox News in order to keep him from going too far off the deep end.
Nuzzi noted that Trump spends his mornings watching television and tweeting and doesn’t get around to the daily intelligence briefing sometimes until 11 AM. It’s nice to know that the leader of the free world has so much time to watch TV:
“Early on, usually we could count on the president watching Morning Joe first thing, at 6 a.m.,” one White House official told me. “He’d watch an hour of that. Then he’d move on to New Day for a segment or two. Then he’d move on to Fox.”
According to Nuzzi, the staffers didn’t seem to have a problem with how much time Trump devoted to watching television, but they did have a problem with the distractions and disruptions set off by the rage tweets that ensued. So, Nuzzi reports, Trump’s then-chief of staff Reince Priebus and then-press secretary Sean Spicer hatched a plan to get him to stick to Fox News:
Like all other ideas, this had the highest chance of implementation if Trump believed he’d thought of it on his own. Priebus and Spicer worked talking points about the network’s high ratings and importance to his base of supporters into conversation until, eventually, it stuck, so that the president’s television consumption is today what the current White House official called “mainly a complete dosage of Fox.” The former official added, “Trump’s someone who loves praise more than he likes hate-watching Morning Joe.”
That’s a terrifying scenario on its own: Trump can’t watch any news other than Fox without losing it and now, thanks to his aides tricking him into it, his only news source comes from one partisan outlet devoted to making him look good. Fox doesn’t even pretend to be “fair and balanced” any more.
Almost as worrisome is the fact that his aides don’t seem to care that a U.S. president may be uninformed or misinformed, except for how it affects them. As you might expect, limiting Trump’s news diet to Fox has created its own problems. Nuzzi includes this quote from a current White House official:
“Sometimes on Fox, a lot of stories are embellished, and they don’t necessarily cover the big news stories of the day. When they cover the smaller stories, if that gets the president riled up, then that becomes an issue. Whenever he tweets, all of us do a mad dash or mad scramble to find out as much information about that random topic as possible. We’re used to it in a lot of ways, so it’s part of our morning routine.”
In case Trump’s lies, bullying, warmongering and bigotry are not upsetting enough, his cocoon of ignorance his aides helped construct ought to really alarm you.
(Trump caricature by DonkeyHotey, via Creative Commons license)
— the immortal words of the late Herb Morrison, the reporter who broadcasted the Hindenburg disaster from Lakehurst, NJ on May 6, 1937.