The New Yorker:

America’s TV-obsessed President has made his rambling Oval Office press gaggles the signature of his second term—chaotic, self-aggrandizing, random, and frequently nasty.

By Susan B. Glasser

In Donald Trump’s first term, he reinvented many things about how the job of President was done. The strictly scheduled day of his predecessors—the rigid procession of fifteen-minute meetings, the early-morning starts—was not for him. Instead, much of his “executive time” was spent in the small dining room off the Oval Office—a place eventually made infamous by his decision to spend a large part of the afternoon of January 6, 2021, there watching a mob of his supporters storm the Capitol and refusing to do anything about it. He would sit there and watch cable television, then tweet about something he saw on TV, and then watch the coverage of his tweet. Having spent years observing that behavior, a former White House official from Trump’s first term once told me that it was as though the President looked at his job as an extended tryout for the role of Mike Teavee, the television-addicted American kid in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” In the film, the boy jumps inside an actual television and finds himself split into millions of pieces, then shrunk into a tiny version of himself. Wonka’s Oompa Loompas stretch him back out on a taffy puller, and sing of how television turns the brain into goop.

In Trump’s case, his second term has demonstrated another thesis—that the President of the United States can spend so much of his day on camera that it is as if he were live-streaming his tenure and not merely obsessively watching it play out on TV. Hardly a day goes by when Trump does not summon the White House press pool—now handpicked by his staff rather than independently chosen by the media itself, as it was for more than a century—for an announcement, a visit with a foreign dignitary, or merely to get a few things off his chest. Sometimes, this happens multiple times in a single day. These Oval Office rambles have largely replaced the more formal press conferences in the East Room which he held during his previous term. And with no more elections to run, Trump has mostly eschewed the big rallies that were the hallmark of his campaigns, preferring to spend time at the White House or at his own private clubs in Florida and New Jersey; one analysis found that, on forty of his first hundred days—and twelve out of fourteen weekends—he spent time at his personal properties.

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