ANALYSIS
| DONALD TRUMP’S JOYLESS PRESIDENCY
Callum
Borchers
MSN |
Editor’s note: The
opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner,
and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.
Is Trump having any
fun in his new job? It seems he lets media scrutiny suck all enjoyment out of a
job that represents the ultimate fulfillment of his principal goal in life:
winning.
New York Times reporter
Maggie Haberman on Friday shared a remarkable and slightly sad anecdote
from Election Night.
Trump had just won the
White House. He should have been ecstatic. His good mood should have been
impermeable.
Instead, an
unflattering — but not particularly damaging — press report was on his
mind. According to Haberman, Trump couldn't help but vent his anger before
basking in his triumph.
Trump's victory speech
a short time later didn't exactly exude joy, either. As Esquire's Michael
Sebastian wrote at the time, it
“was not a soaring address. It was subdued and informal, like a long toast at a
local Rotary Club from a guy who didn't think he was supposed to give a speech
— at least not a victory speech.”
In office, Trump has
appeared highly susceptible to souring by critical coverage. He had been
president for all of 75 hours when White House press secretary Sean Spicer described him as demoralized
by the media:
The default narrative is always negative, and it’s
demoralizing. And I think that when you sit here and you realize the sacrifice
the guy made, leaving a very, very successful business because he really cares
about this country and he wants — despite your partisan differences, he
cares about making this country better for everybody. He wants to make it safer
for everybody.
And so when you wake up everyday and that’s what
you’re seeing over and over again, and you’re not seeing stories about the
Cabinet folks that he’s appointing or the success that he’s having trying to
keep American jobs here. Yes, it is a little disappointing.
Then in February,
during his first news conference as president — an
opportunity to extol the achievements of his first month — a surly Trump
ranted against the media.
A week later, in the
friendly confines of the Conservative Political Action Conference (“We love
you!” an audience member shouted, as the president took the stage), Trump
remained under a dark cloud. He devoted 12 minutes at the beginning of his address to airing
media grievances.
The Washington
Post's Philip Rucker, Robert Costa and Ashley Parker (the same Ashley
Parker who previously worked with Haberman at the Times) reported in early March that
“the president has been seething as he watches round-the-clock cable news
coverage.”
Their story chronicled
the extent to which Trump's spirits rise and fall, according to the news cycle:
up amid praise for his first address to Congress, down a day later, when The
Post reported on undisclosed campaign-year conversations between Jeff Sessions,
now the attorney general, and Russia's ambassador to the United States. Up
again when the media covered Trump's unsubstantiated accusation of wiretapping
by former President Barack Obama, back down when the Sunday political talk
shows featured Republicans unwilling to defend the baseless charge.
Discussing his health
on TV with Mehmet Oz in the fall, Trump acknowledged that running for president
is stressful and said that “one of the reasons is the media is so
dishonest.”
Oz seemed concerned
about the toll of media-induced stress on Trump.
“You get angry about
that?” he asked the then-candidate. “We know anger — hostility — has
significant health consequences. How do you cope with that? How do you get past
that?”
Trump, loath to show
any sign of weakness, then tried to play down the media's hold on him, saying
that negative coverage doesn't stress him out as much as it would “if the press
mattered.”
“It's amazing,” he
said. “It doesn't matter as much, like it used to matter.”
The media clearly
matters to Trump, however. And Trump's penchant for holding grudges seems
to be sucking whatever joy should come with winning the ultimate prize.
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