It’s no secret that Donald Trump and television have a special relationship. Before his unlikely ascent to the presidency, Trump used the medium to transform himself into “Donald Trump”: “the multimedia character that he has honed and performed over decades, in the New York newspapers, on Oprah, in Trump: The Art of the Deal, in sitcoms and movies, on The Apprentice, in Fox News studios, on the Internet, in the WWE wrestling ring, in campaign rallies and in the White House,” New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik writes in his new book, Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America, out September 10. Since the 2016 election, Trump and TV have, if anything, become even more intertwined: “As a candidate, Trump controlled TV,” Poniewozik writes. “As president, he would be controlled by TV.”

In the excerpt below, the author details what happened when television began to talk back to Trump, creating a nightmarish feedback loop the likes of which American media had never seen—a strange, absurdist new reality where even the most outlandish claims, like the notion that Trump demanded to watch a TV channel “that screened nothing but gorilla-based content, 24 hours a day,” seemed not just plausible, but probable.

When Donny Trump was a little boy in Queens, a childhood friend of his recalls, he used to watch Andy’s Gang, a Saturday kids’ show hosted by Andy Devine. Once a popular comic-relief actor in cowboy movies, Devine was a gentle giant with a big lopsided smile. Every episode, his naughty puppet sidekick Froggy the Gremlin would work the studio audience into wild-edged peals of hysteria with his pranks. But at the end Devine would calm things down and speak straight to the kids at home: “Yes, sir, we’re pals. Pals stick together. Now gang, don’t forget church or Sunday school!”

This was the promise of the show: You would be swept up into a communal frenzy until you could barely control yourself, but in the end you would be accepted, loved, reassured that you were good.

Fox & Friends in the Trump era morphed into a morning children’s show for the president of the United States. Kids’ programs often hold the attention of their distractible audience by addressing them through the fourth wall. Dora the Explorer asked kids to help her chase off Swiper the Fox: “Say, ‘Swiper, no swiping!’” Elmo became the most popular Muppet on Sesame Street by talking to toddlers directly. The local hosts of Romper Room would pretend to look through a “magic mirror” and see the children in the home audience, calling them out by name.

Fox & Friends applied that formula to an audience of one. Its hosts offered Trump encouragement, flattery, and advice. When he tweeted, his tweets—many mornings, in perfect sync with the show’s topics—would materialize on a giant video wall. One morning in January 2017, the show put a video feed of the White House onscreen and asked Trump to flash the lights on and off if he was watching. The producers added an effect of the lights flickering, a “TV trick” the hosts later acknowledged.

But for Trump, the childhood illusion—that your favorite show is as aware of you as you are of it—became real. Fox & Friends was Donald Trump’s magic mirror.

The president was the show’s audience, its subject, its publicist, and its virtual fourth host. His morning tweets set the focus of the show, which often scrambled to keep up. After the failure of a Republican health care plan, his rage tweets careered from “REPEAL failing ObamaCare now” to “As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail” to advocating “full repeal” again. The Fox & Friends caption tried to impose order on the morning’s whiplash: “As Congress Spars, President Focuses on Jobs.” Spurred by a Trump tweet complaining that Senate Democrats were holding up his judicial nominees, Brian Kilmeade called the Democrats’ resistance “anti-American.”