The Ravenous Media Diet of Donald Trump

President Trump has a frequent, if slightly out-of-date, complaint in the era of the online press: The stories he prefers always seem to get buried in the print edition.

After signing a deal to reduce drug prices, the president complained that the New York Times had only written “a little story,” and worse yet, the positive coverage was tucked “way in the back of the paper.” Never mind that the publication sells more digital than print subscriptions, or that the story now lives forever online. Trump remains obsessed instead with the real estate of the front page.

He reads hard copies of all the big papers and then he consumes most everything else.

The president famous for his attacks on “fake news” may be the most voracious consumer of journalism in the modern era. “You can’t win battles unless you know your enemy,” Hogan Gidley, who served as principal deputy press secretary during his first term, told RealClearPolitics. “He knows the enemy because he reads them.”

More than half a dozen current and former White House officials, who requested anonymity to discuss the oversized presidential news diet, agree. The consensus: “He is a news junkie.”

The commander in chief begins his morning by channel surfing in the White House residence. “Fox and Friends” remains the favorite, but before the day officially begins, Trump flips through CNBC, CNN, and the cable station formerly known as MSNBC, a habit that inspires frequent media criticism shared via Truth Social.

A stack of newspapers awaits when Trump arrives in the private study outside the Oval Office. He reads the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal cover to cover. The president is known to peruse USA Today and the Financial Times. And it’s a close reading with Sharpie in hand.

Trump often writes notes to columnists and reporters. He will autograph pieces and send them back to their author if he agrees with the content, or he will write out, sometimes at length, exactly what he found objectionable. Then the president picks up the phone. Front-page news often drives the agenda most mornings.

A story about crime, drones, or the price of oil could move him to put a line into Attorney General Pam Bondi, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffey, or Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. If there is a report about their department above the fold, a member of the Cabinet told RCP that a conversation is likely. “He reads constantly but doesn’t really forward articles,” the secretary said. “He will usually call.”

A fire drill follows as members of the president’s team either amplify good press to stay in his good graces or downplay unflattering stories as false. While Trump operates according to the maxim that all press is good press, White House officials are not given the same benefit of the doubt. “He judges people off the press they get,” explained a source who had been on the receiving end of that praise and criticism.

“Once I walked into the Oval Office the day after somebody had written something really critical of me, and the president goes, ‘Looks like you got some very bad coverage in the Washington Post,’” recalled Mick Mulvaney, who served as Trump’s third chief of staff, in an interview with RCP.

“Boss, how is it that you know almost everything that’s written about you is false,” the chief objected “but everything you read about someone else in the same outlet is the gospel truth?”

Mulvaney remembers Trump laughing before admitting that his chief “was probably right.”

The major outlets get first billing. News from smaller outlets trickles through as part of a prepared packet of reading. “Axios is a good example. He doesn’t consume Axios in any organic way,” a source familiar with the president’s habits said of the Beltway-focused digital outlet, but if there is a short piece about positive polling or economic growth, that “is the kind of story that would get printed out for him.”

“I have never seen a more ravenous reader in my entire life,” said Gidley, the former principal deputy press secretary who recalled how boxes of articles, books, and magazines were regularly loaded onto Air Force One to maintain Trump’s interest.

This is the responsibility of Natalie Harp. Executive assistant to the president, she occupies an office just outside the Oval and has been dubbed “the human printer.” The devoted aide travels everywhere with a portable printer and emergency battery pack to ensure she can supply hard copies of news articles to Trump at any time. This makes the 35-year-old Harp the most powerful news aggregator in all of Washington. Some in the president’s orbit question her news judgement, especially after Harp notably forwarded the president articles from the conspiracy-minded outlets. But her influence is undeniable and seldom checked, even by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. “Her desk is a lot closer [to Trump] than Susie,” a source familiar with the dynamic said, “so there is only so much Susie can be visible to.”

The other avenue to the president? What White House staff call “intercepts,” the term for information texted by interested parties, often members of Congress, directly to the leader of the free world.

Trump appreciates the unscheduled updates from a wide circle. His staff can find them a burdensome distraction, especially when the reading inspires the president to change course. “Very little vetting goes into that sort of thing,” complained a source familiar with the process and who speculated that an outside party may have texted the Trump the now infamous video portraying former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as apes. Trump later said he didn’t see that portion of the clip and deleted it from his social media.

Television remains omnipresent in the White House as Trump makes, then absorbs via osmosis, the news cycle. Four cable channels would play simultaneously on mute in the private office, so he could toggle between shows during his first term. The TV is now almost set exclusively to a single channel.

When word spread during the previous administration that President Biden still had the News Journal delivered to his Wilmington home, interest groups rushed to buy full-size ads in the small Delaware paper. But for Trump it is and always has been Fox News.

After Trump was reelected, Mulvaney quipped to a former member of the Cabinet that the two should buy the next two years of airtime on Fox News. They could have sold it, he joked, for healthy profit in the secondary market. But there is truth in that kidding. “Everyone in the whole world who wants to talk to the president knows they should buy ads on his favorite networks,” Mulvaney explained. This includes members of his own White House.

Trump often heaps praise on his people in public for a particularly good television appearance but in private he is known to deliver harsh criticism if his standards are not met. “He calls to tell me what a great job I did,” a member of the current Cabinet told RCP, before adding that, while they have only received positive feedback, with others the president can be “more negative.”

While Fox News remains the most important real estate, Gidley notes that the cable spectrum has expanded for Trump World. The White House mocked CNN as “the Chicken News Network” after Stephen Miller was kept off those airwaves for a time. The acerbic deputy chief of staff has since been rebooked. “It was tough to get Cabinet secretaries on television in the first administration,” the former deputy press secretary said. “Now it’s like the only infighting is, who can get on television more?”

And the president watches it all, if not live, through clips after the fact. But he does not regularly watch the evening news on the major networks, sources familiar with his habits say, and he “rarely” tunes in live to smaller upstart outlets like One America News and Newsmax despite their friendly editorial bent.

The White House disputed that characterization of programming preferences. “He watches Newsmax and OANN,” one official said while noting the interviews Trump has done with both networks and the clips he shares on social media. But there is a human limit to how much news anyone, even the president, can consume. What remains undisputed is Trump’s adoration for TiVo. He often catches up on a large cache of programming after the workday is officially done using the recording service that he calls “one of the greatest inventions of all time.”

How can a president watch that much television, let alone do that much reading, while also attending to the business of the nation? Sources close to the president say the answer is simple: He doesn’t sleep, or at least, he sleeps very little, often just four hours.

“No president in history has a better finger on the pulse of what the American people truly care about than President Trump,” said White House spokeswoman Liz Huston. “That’s because President Trump is an extraordinarily avid consumer of information – always up to date on the news of the day so he can highlight his administration’s historic achievements and hold the legacy media accountable whenever they spread fake news.”

Such is Trump’s nature, said Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University political scientist who doggedly tracks presidential press interactions. “It goes back to who he is,” she said pointing to his sometimes friendly, sometimes adversarial courtship of New York tabloids before his days in politics: “Communications was critical to everything he did in business and later with ‘the Apprentice,’ where he learned how to deal with the world of television.”

Staff have tried to match the evolving and ravenous media diet of the president as best they can. The increased emphasis on the economy has inspired aides, including press secretary Karoline Leavitt, to add CNBC business coverage to their regular rotation. But regardless of what is on the screen, a source familiar with White House operations explained, “The first thing he asks when he walks into a room with a TV on is ‘What are they saying?’”

Often Trump already knows.

Philip Wegmann is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.