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As the pressure of being president intensified, Trump would erupt in anger more often. As a rule, Trump unleashes his anger when he legitimately feels a task has not been performed correctly. It’s his way of imposing accountability. But his anger is often a scattered blast out of proportion to the issue at hand and sometimes aimed at the wrong target.
“When he really gets mad, he’s screaming at you,” Bannon says. “But the bark is worse than the bite.”
Aides compare Trump’s anger with taking a two-by-four and hitting someone over the head if they spilled water on the floor. The White House staff tends to work eighteen hours a day, but if one thing goes wrong, Trump will lash out. Instead of focusing on successes, he tends to focus on the faults.
What Trump sees on TV drives much of his anger, and he is never far from a set that is turned on. According to aides, Trump will see something negative about himself on TV and will then go crazy about it and berate whoever he thinks is at fault. Whether the report is true or not, he will focus on it and bring it up two days later. He’ll continue to hammer on it because someone on TV said it was true. Aides would tell him the report was not true, but if someone said it on TV, it’s true.
While Trump hates the New York Times for running dishonest stories and calls it a “pipe organ for the Democratic Party,” he craves the respect of his hometown paper and other mainstream outlets like the Washington Post. Thus, he continues to give the paper interviews, disregarding the advice of his media staffers.
“He believes like this is his hometown paper,” Spicer says of the New York Times. “He likes the respectability of being in the Times. Those stories in the New York Times mean more to him than say others.”
“It was like a dorky kid in high school who makes a million dollars in Silicon Valley and then wants to go back and ask out the hot homecoming queen,” an aide says. “He just wants to prove that you should have gone out with me—I made it!”
“He always thinks he can charm the media and get a good story,” Bannon notes. “I keep telling him these guys are killers. They’re all assassins. I know some of these people very well, and I like them. They’re still assassins.”
Trump phones Maggie Haberman of the New York Times directly, as well as Philip Rucker of the Washington Post, and Jonathan Swan of Axios, feeding them stories attributed to “a senior White House official,” creating the impression the White House leaks even more than it already does. In other cases, the media has picked up reports on what Trump himself has said to his friends.
While generally accurate, Haberman’s stories about Trump and his White House are uniformly negative.
Yet, “He wants eventually to win her over,” a Trump aide says. “The president subscribes to the general theory that a little love can go a long way. Even if a story will be bad, give it a shot and maybe it will come out a little better.”
“He will say he had seven New York Times page-one stories before he ran for president, but on one day as president, he counted seven,” Bannon says.
Trump has a similar fixation with Time magazine, a publication he has said he grew up with. On the one hand, he seems to crave being named Time’s person of the year. On the other hand, he has described it as a “paper-thin” publication that will “soon be dead.”
Yet at the same time, Trump did not grant interviews or was slow to do interviews with outlets like Newsmax, Daily Caller, or Daily Mail that give him generally positive coverage.
“It was always a frustration of mine, because I didn’t understand why we weren’t taking care of people who were either fair or favorable,” Spicer says.
Early on, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s Morning Joe were fans. Scarborough and Brzezinski met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago when the black-tie New Year’s Eve party to ring in 2017 was about to begin, to try to arrange an interview during Trump’s first week as president. I was standing a few feet away from the two cohosts, who were dressed casually, as they checked in with Trump and he led them off to meet with him.
Contrary to some press reports, they were not guests at the party. Nonetheless, some reporters attacked them for attending a Trump party. If they had attended an Obama party, the coverage would have been far different: Those same reporters would have been jealous.
While he did not give them an interview, Trump invited the MSNBC cohosts to lunch at the White House and gave them a tour of the White House residence. But Trump soured on them when they began attacking him on their show.
“I think he felt as though Joe Scarborough was very two-faced and would say things to him, to his face and on the phone and then would go out and say these crappy things about him on television,” Spicer says. “I think he just got tired of it.”
As the fulcrum between Trump and the media, Spicer was a constant target of the president’s criticism, voiced directly to him and to others. Trump micromanaged the press secretary, critiquing his briefings. Adding to the pressure, reporters would try to trip him up with their questions.
“I think in a lot of cases, it became less about the news and more about them,” Spicer says. “For many reporters, the goal is to figure out, ‘How can I get a moment of fame?’ There were days when I’d go see the president afterwards, and he’d say I didn’t like that answer and why didn’t you answer it this way?” Spicer says. “Or he would say, why did you even call on that reporter?”
Trump would complain that Spicer wasn’t closing well or wasn’t answering questions well. While Trump could change his mind, most of the time once he comes to a conclusion about a staffer, he sticks with it.
Early on, Trump would complain to aides about Spicer’s gray suits, and the president’s grumbling would end up in the press. Seeing the press reports, Trump volunteered to Spicer at one point that he had never complained about his suits. However, Spicer took to wearing darker suits.
Trump even blamed Spicer for the fact that Melissa McCarthy was hilariously portraying him as “Spicey” on Saturday Night Live. Trump thought that was an insult, and he didn’t like that Sean laughed about it.
Often the problem was that while Spicer gave a perfectly reasonable explanation, reporters nitpicked and made an issue of it. Reporters loved to put Spicer and later Sarah Huckabee Sanders on the defensive by prefacing their questions, “Are you concerned that…” In fact, Spicer’s press briefings brilliantly explained conservative principles and often addressed attacks with humor.
Even conservative journalists with no ax to grind would ask incredibly dumb questions of both Spicer and Trump. The Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper, for example, asked Trump if the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision upholding a lower court ruling that imposed an injunction on the ban on travel from certain countries “caused you to rethink your use of executive power?”
In other words, now that the administration had lost one court ruling, would Trump pack up his bags, abandon his presidency, and not exercise his power as the chief executive and commander in chief?
Another reporter at a press briefing asked, “Sean, generally speaking, within the Trump administration, how important is it for the president that everyone working for this administration is honest on their security clearance forms?”
Whenever Spicer spoke passionately in defending Trump, the press would say that he had lost his cool.
Nothing changed when Sarah Huckabee Sanders took over. Before Thanksgiving in 2017, she tweeted a photo of a chocolate pecan pie she had baked to serve at the family farm. April Ryan, American Urban Radio Networks’ Washington bureau chief and a CNN political analyst, responded in a tweet by implying that Sanders lied about baking the pie herself.
“I am not trying to be funny but folks are already saying #piegate and #fakepie. Show it to us on the table with folks eating it and a pic of you cooking it,” she tweeted.
Sanders’s father, Mike Huckabee, weighed in, saying his daughter has been baking pecan pies for years, while Sanders graciously said she would bake more pies for reporters.
Decades ago, reporters understood that press briefings were to convey and clarify the news. Questions were asked to elicit information. Now that briefings are televised, reporters seize the opportunity to preen before the cameras and badger the briefer—conduct that years ago editors considered unprofessional. In those days, if reporters wanted to uncover their own facts, they could engage in investigative reporting. Any reporter publicly questioning without any evidence whether the White House press secretary had made up a story about baking a pie would have been fired as a disgrace to the profession.
The fact that Spicer’s briefings generated high TV ratings grated on Trump even more. In contrast, while Sarah Sanders could be witty, Trump seemed to like the fact that she attracted less attention than Spicer did.
“A lot of times the president just wanted to do press conferences on his own,” Priebus says. “He would just say, ‘I’m going to do a press conference this week. And I don’t know what day it’s going to be, but I’m just going to feel when the time is right, and I’m going to tell you when.’ He would just wake up in the morning and say, ‘Today, I’m going to do a press conference.’ ”
While the staff prepared him, Trump did not want to be overly prepared.
“He had a good knack for giving us a few days of a breather from all of the crazy stories that were out there,” Priebus says.
Trump’s habit of making outrageous or incendiary comments is both a blessing and a curse.
“I do know he [Trump] shoots from the hip, and he says whatever flies out at the time…” Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples, offered during the campaign. “But I also don’t think that his intentions are negative for this country.”
While Trump’s tweets and comments in interviews sometimes seem bizarre, they position him as the number one topic of the day and thus enhance his power. As he famously said in his book The Art of the Deal, “good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.”
Thus, when Trump claims that the head of the Boy Scouts called to say his was the best speech ever delivered to the organization, or he claims that the president of Mexico picked up the telephone to let him know that his tough enforcement efforts at the border were paying off, Trump knows that his comments will be exposed as falsehoods, undercutting his credibility. But he simply doesn’t care.
Some aides thought that when making a statement that will quickly be exposed as false, Trump convinces himself that it is true in order to retain some degree of intellectual integrity and still pursue his agenda.
“Look, I think that he has an amazing belief in his own ability to will what he thinks into reality,” Maggie Haberman of the New York Times told David Remnick of the New Yorker. “And I think that he thinks of reality as something that is subjective. So I think that what people characterize as ‘he’s out of touch’ or ‘he’s not understanding this’ or ‘he seems off,’ or whatever—I think he has an amazing capacity to try to draw the world as he wants it.”
While his comments often get him in trouble, Trump’s candor, with his signature asides, endears him to his voters. His no-nonsense approach helps him make deals. But Trump’s public stream-of-consciousness complaints about his own staff undercut morale and turned off potential White House hires, especially when Trump’s more caustic comments land in the press.
Like everything else about Trump, no one can be sure exactly what is going on in his complex head. But in The Art of the Deal, Trump said that he promotes by bravado.
“I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump wrote. “People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration and a very effective form of promotion.”
Aides see Trump’s attitude as his way of marketing. Maybe no one will know whether or not the Boy Scouts or the president of Mexico called. Or if he is questioned about it, it will stir another controversy, garnering more publicity. If the false claims create blowback, he enjoys being the center of attention regardless. In the same way, his constantly shifting positions are a marketing ploy to see what sticks.
Trump will “sort of throw vitriolic things out there to see the reaction,” an aide says. “And once in a while, he floats things, inappropriate things, out there and he gets pounded for it, but instead of backing down, he doubles down. And he sort of regrets doing it. He’ll come back and say, ‘Ah, man, maybe I shouldn’t have done that tweet. Do you think that tweet was a good idea?’ ”
For example, Trump asked aides if he thought his tweet claiming that he had been wiretapped by President Obama in Trump Tower was a good idea. The claim was untrue and was quickly shown to be false. It went back to unsubstantiated media reports, including most notably a claim by former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy of National Review based on those reports, that the “Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.” But remarkably, despite his bluster, Trump created an atmosphere where aides felt comfortable disagreeing with him and giving their honest opinions, telling him the tweet about Obama wiretapping him was not a good idea.
To be sure, Obama told his share of lies, such as “If you like your doctor, you’ll be able to keep your doctor” and “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan” with Obamacare, but his untruths were not as patently obvious. The Washington Post’s fact checker Glenn Kessler called Trump “the most fact-challenged politician that the Fact Checker has ever encountered.”
Whether you approve or not, Trump does indeed have a strategy. He is gaming the media: If the claims are believed, they burnish his image and enhance his aura as a showman.
“[F]rom a pure business point of view, the benefits of being written about have far outweighed the drawbacks,” Trump said in The Art of the Deal. “It’s really quite simple…. The funny thing is that even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business.”
Back in 2006, I faxed Trump my column demonstrating that the claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya was a hoax. Headlined “Obama Was Born in the United States,” it said, “Aside from that official verification of Obama’s birth in Hawaii, back on Aug. 31, 1961, the Honolulu Advertiser and Honolulu Star-Bulletin each ran an announcement of his birth. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, son, Aug. 4.’ ”
Thus, unless Obama’s parents knew when he was born that the baby Barack wanted one day to run for president of the United States and deviously placed the announcement of his birth in the Honolulu paper to provide evidence that he was born a U.S. citizen, the conspiracy theory that was gaining widespread traction on the far right was bogus. But Trump continued to push the false claim because it served his political purposes.
Finally, tacked on to the end of a campaign appearance with military veterans at his new Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington in September 2016, Trump said, “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.” Now, he added, “…we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”
While Trump’s outrageous comments may seem unhinged and turn off an array of voters, they inspire fear in the minds of foreign leaders and business tycoons whose help he needs and elicit cooperation from those he wants to woo. And in contrast to some of his comments, his actions—such as his carefully considered strategy for ramping up military engagement in Afghanistan—are perfectly reasonable. In private he may exaggerate but does not fabricate.
Given everyone’s short attention span heightened by the twenty-four-hour news cycle, Trump’s controversial claims are forgotten quickly. After Trump demonstrated a command of recovery efforts in Texas following Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath, Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who had criticized Trump’s pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, shocked a San Francisco audience when she said in answer to whether he should be impeached, “The question is whether he can learn and change. If so, I believe he can be a good president.”
“The real excitement is playing the game,” Trump said in The Art of the Deal. Winning is everything.