WH Officials Reportedly Tricked Trump Into Watching Fox & Friends Over Morning Joe and New Day
In a bygone age, during the days of Chief-of-Staff Reince Priebus and Press Secretary Sean Spicer, President Donald Trump was someone very different – someone who watched (gasp!) CNN and MSNBC.
At least, that’s according to new reporting from New York Magazine‘s Olivia Nuzzi, who writes that White House officials concocted a plan to keep the volatile president on track by changing his diet – his television diet, that is.
Trump would reportedly work himself into a tizzy watching Morning Joe and New Day, tweeting all manner of disgruntled miscellany before an 11 A.M. briefing, in which he would review the slights of the morning in a furor and in great detail.
“It got to the point that they were just like, ‘We need to get him off these channels and onto Fox & Friends or else we’re going to be chasing down this crazy-train bullshit from MSNBC and CNN all day,’ ” a former White House official told New York.
That’s when Priebus and Spicer got involved. According to New York, the two would work in “talking points” to the morning briefing about how successful Fox News was and how it was the preferred network of his supporters, hoping that Trump would shift to watching solely that network on his own. It worked like a charm.
“Trump’s someone who loves praise more than he likes hate-watching Morning Joe,” the former official said.
Naturally, a Fox binge will bring its own set of issues, and a current official said that “When [Fox] cover[s] the smaller stories, if that gets the president riled up, then that becomes an issue” and that whenever the president tweets, the office is in a “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,” the official added.
The former White House official framed it a little differently. “[It’s] a fucked-up feedback loop [which puts the president] in a weird headspace. What ends up happening is Judge Jeanine or Hannity fill him up with a bunch of crazy shit, and everyone on staff has to go and knock down all the fucking fires they started.”
[image via screengrab]
