Over the years of his presidency, as controversies and investigations into his conduct began to grow, television became a less reliable safe space. The transmission networks, pressured to be more aggressive in their approach to him and his aides, asked more difficult questions. With the exception of Fox News, the cable networks that rushed to air it throughout 2016 and in the early stages of his presidency repressed him, reducing the broadcast of his live performances in particular.
The Presidential Transition
And his adventures in the White House instruction room generally did not go well and revealed the limits of his understanding of politics or current events. A Trump adviser went straight, saying the president did not like most aspects of his job, and that included questions for which he did not know the answers.
So when Mr. Trump went to the instruction room for weeks in the spring to discuss the coronavirus, the advisers said, he liked the visual aspects of his performance, but not the reality of having a shuttle that led to him being convicted and ridiculed for his dangerous statements about how to fight the virus with bleach and light and his factless claims about how everything is getting better.
Twitter became a stage that he could more firmly manage.
It was revealing that, throughout his tenure, Trump chose his @realdonaldtrump account as the main Twitter channel, not his official @Potus account. He understood the power to build his personal brand and keep it separate from his official duties as president. Twitter has given you a unique way of expressing yourself as you are, without being filtered by presidential norms.
He rolled his own Twitter feed, looking for answers to new topics to drop. He studied Twitter’s trend lists as signs of where the speech was going.
Somehow, television became the means by which he could watch the effects of his tweets.
The television in the dining room of his alcove outside the Oval Office used to stay on in the back, a catnip for his short attention span. He consumed much of his information through him and watched the coverage of his tweets.
Trump’s White House advisers said he loved to tweet and then watch the chyrons on cable news channels that change rapidly in response. For a septuagenarian whose closest allies and advisers often exhibit a preteen’s emotional development and for whom attention has been a narcotic, the instant gratification of his tweets was hard to match.