President Trump woke up on November 3rd, turned on the television, and started tweeting shortly before 7 A.M. “Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn’t looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems,” he typed. “People are angry.” By “everybody” and “people,” he seemed to mean, as he often does, the three anchors of the top-rated cable morning show, “Fox & Friends,” who happened to be discussing that very topic live on air, deploying their trademark brand of folksy, disingenuous outrage.

Soon afterward, one of the co-hosts said, “And now the President is tweeting about this.”

“I think he’s tweeting right now!” another said. The thin fourth wall between Trump and his TV had been broken once again.

In the Fox News studio, the fresh tweets were displayed in bold type on a thirty-foot-wide screen, Trump’s larger-than-life Twitter avatar peering, Rushmore-like, into the middle distance. (Presumably, the real Trump, in the Presidential bedroom, peered back, an elderly youth gazing into a shallow pool.) A co-host read the tweets aloud, and then, completing the feedback loop, said, “This has been the question that people have had about Hillary Clinton and her campaign.” By “people,” she seemed to mean, as the anchors of “Fox & Friends” often do, Donald Trump.

“Fox & Friends” ended at nine. Moments later, Trump arrived on the South Lawn of the White House, answered a few questions from reporters, and left for a ten-day trip to Asia. A few days into the trip, en route from China to Vietnam, he walked to the rear of Air Force One, where the press corps was sitting, to deliver some off-the-cuff remarks. “I know they like to say—people that don’t know me—they like to say I watch television,” he said. “People with fake sources—you know, fake reporters, fake sources. But I don’t get to watch much television, primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents a lot.”

This was weird, even by Trump’s standards. For one thing, “reading documents a lot” is high on the list of activities it’s nearly impossible to imagine Trump doing, along with foraging, Pilates, and introspection. For another, no one on the plane had said anything about television. It later became clear that the impetus for Trump’s outburst was an e-mail he’d just received from the Times—a list of fifty-one fact-checking questions for an article about him. Of these, he felt compelled to respond, indirectly, to just one, about his “prodigious television watching habits.” When the piece came out, it reported that Trump begins his day by watching TV in bed, where he “tweets while propped on his pillow.” (Trump, on Twitter: “Wrong!”)

Trump has been candid about his TV dependency for years. In a 1997 interview with Howard Stern, he described escaping from his own wedding reception—his second, when he married Marla Maples—as quickly as possible to look at coverage of the wedding. “I ran back and turned on the television,” he said. (A diagnostic test called the Television Addiction Scale asks subjects to agree or disagree with several statements, including “When I am unable to watch television, I miss it so much that you could call it ‘withdrawal.’ ”) During his trip to Asia, he tweeted, “I was forced to watch @CNN, which I have not done in months, and again realized how bad, and FAKE, it is. Loser!” Of course, apart from rare circumstances (jury duty, North Korea, “Get Out”), no one, much less the President of the United States, is ever “forced” to watch TV. One imagines Trump writhing in pain, using his tie as a blindfold, while his staff scrambles to find him more documents to read.

On a recent morning, a chyron on “Fox & Friends” read “STUDY: 90% RECENT TRUMP COVERAGE IS NEGATIVE.” The study—by the Media Research Center, a right-wing nonprofit whose declared “sole mission is to expose and neutralize the propaganda arm of the Left: the national news media”—came up several times during the broadcast, as did an F.B.I. agent’s anti-Trump text messages, a pair of offensive socks that Colin Kaepernick had worn once in 2016, and the fact that it was very cold outside. Morning TV relies on constant repetition, the assumption being that most viewers, unlike the President, will be too busy to watch for long. (A chart of Trump’s 2017 tweets, created by a University of Chicago graduate student and plotted by time of day, reveals an unmistakably dense band between 6 A.M. and 9 A.M., when “Fox & Friends” is on the air.)

“Wow, more than 90% of Fake News Media coverage of me is negative,” Trump tweeted. He ended the tweet by naming his source, as well as his favorite exception: “@foxandfriends.”

Every morning begins with an artificial L.E.D. sunrise, all teal and goldenrod, like an orange-juice carton come to life. The camera starts on the bottom floor of Fox News’ lavish main studio, then glides upward—past a translucent staircase, past thirty-foot windows overlooking a still dark Sixth Avenue, past innumerable video screens—until it locates the three co-hosts, perched on their signature white “curvy couch.”

“C’mon in!” Steve Doocy said recently, beckoning viewers with one arm. Doocy, who has hosted “Fox & Friends” since its inception, in 1998, is the show’s jovial, distant dad, greeting all comers with a bemused rictus. His name sounds like a gentle pejorative that would describe him perfectly. In addition to being unflappable, he is tall and blond. These appear to be his only job qualifications.

“It’s a Monday morning,” Ainsley Earhardt said, adjusting her fuchsia jumpsuit and sucking the lipstick from her teeth. “Let’s pretend today is Friday.” Earhardt, from South Carolina, is a conservative Christian who is liberal in her use of “y’all”s and “God bless you”s; on a recent show, Geraldo Rivera referred to her as a “Palmetto queen,” and she smiled demurely at the compliment.

Brian Kilmeade—squat, distractible, tightly wound—tore at a pen cap. “You feel like every day is Friday,” he grumbled at Earhardt, with a taut smile. In addition to repetition, the morning-show formula calls for heaps of fatuous banter. Kilmeade, a mini Sean Hannity in both appearance and affect, performs this duty truculently; he might endure a debate about whether the new Taylor Swift is better than the old Taylor Swift, but you can tell he’d rather be debating whether Robert Mueller should be waterboarded or put before a firing squad. Perhaps Kilmeade resents spontaneous small talk because it has led him into trouble. Once, while riffing about a Scandinavian scientific study, he shared his opinion that “the Swedes have pure genes,” unlike Americans, who “keep marrying other species and other ethnics.” He later apologized.

Network morning shows, such as “Today” and “Good Morning America,” are bland products that try to avoid confusing, provoking, or offending any part of the audience. For this reason, especially nowadays, they tend to speed past political stories, or avoid them altogether, and instead fill time with the sort of banal chitchat that strangers might make at the post office. When a host refers to a topic that “everyone is talking about this morning,” it’s usually a cute viral video, an upcoming holiday, or a snowstorm. (It’s no coincidence that one of “Today” ’s biggest stars is its weatherman.) On cable, where the audiences are smaller and more ideologically segmented, morning hosts are free to be more opinionated; on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” for example, Trump is compared to an autocrat, a thug, or worse. “Fox & Friends” mashes these two genres together, resulting in some whiplash-inducing segues. A few minutes of misty-eyed Christmas nostalgia leads immediately—“meanwhile, switching gears”—to a conspiracy theory about Benghazi. A weather report gives way to a warning about the dangers of chain migration, with little adjustment in tone.