Mandel Ngan/Getty Images Opinion Turn off the TV, Mr. President

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review and a contributing editor with Politico Magazine.

Donald Trump is the first president in U.S. history to have been baited into undermining his own negotiating position by negative TV coverage.

Less than 12 hours after Attorney General Jeff Sessions explained that the administration is ending DACA because it’s unconstitutional, Trump tweeted that he might “revisit” the program if Congress doesn’t act.


This was an implicit admission that he’s bluffing on DACA, which gives Democrats every incentive not to trade anything meaningful for a codification of the program. Why make any painful concessions to save DACA if the president is loath to truly terminate it?

Surely, Trump wasn’t thinking of any strategic or legislative imperatives; he was thinking only of how to push back against commentators calling him heartless. The time of the tweet — 8:38 p.m. — strongly suggests that he was watching TV, and reporting has confirmed as much.

Which raises questions: Doesn’t the president have better things to do than to be watching political punditry on cable TV shows? Since he’s one of the most famous and powerful people on the planet, why the hell does he care what is said on these shows? And if he is going to pursue an agenda of immigration restriction, doesn’t he realize that the overwhelming majority of commentators on TV will be excoriatingly negative?

Obama famously described himself as having a pen and a phone (that’s how we got DACA). Trump has a phone and a remote control, and often works them in tandem as he criticizes, praises and comments on things said about him on air.

Trump is the most unusual combination of a politician who, on one hand, was elected president by thumbing his nose at media elites and trampling on their dearest beliefs and, on the other, is obsessed about what media elites write and say about him.

It’s understandable that John McCain, who joked about the media being his political base, would care about what’s said about him in the press. But Trump? Who every other day broadcasts his contempt for journalists and is unafraid to take actions — pulling out of the Paris climate accord, revoking DACA — that are guaranteed to generate media outrage?

Trump is experiencing the agony of the media-bashing media figure.

He follows what’s said on cable TV more closely than many people who make a living as commentators on cable TV. He sometimes knows more about the industry gossip than people who work in the industry. And when doing interviews, he can have firmer opinions about the camera angles and technicalities than the people doing the interviews.

This reflects his background as a TV star who leveraged his fame into the presidency. But it is, needless to say, highly unusual.

George W. Bush didn’t pay much attention to his media coverage, confident that history would get it right and unwilling to let consuming media divert his attention from more important things. Barack Obama had an Olympian disregard for political punditry, the same way he had an Olympian disregard for many things.

It’s not just that Trump watches — he really cares. In the normal course of things, a president wouldn’t know who pro-Trump commentator Jeffrey Lord is, let alone complain about his firing from CNN in public, as Trump did at his Phoenix rally.

When Laura Ingraham mentioned on “Fox & Friends” last week that the administration needs to do a better job of filling empty positions, Trump tweeted a response immediately and directly (the positions aren’t needed, he said).

He can’t bear not to watch “Morning Joe,” the buzzy MSNBC program, even when he insists he doesn’t, and, of course, launched a contemptible attack on co-host Mika Brzezinski in retaliation for her criticisms of him.

Trump time and again demonstrates that he is wounded by what he hears on TV. The president is used to being in the limelight and has always been controversial, but nothing like this. No one hates you when you have a hit TV show, or at least not the way they hate you when you are a president whose critics believe represents a dire threat to liberal values.

Trump can’t escape a negative feedback loop. His program and cultural attitudes will always be anathema to the media whose harsh reactions will pain Trump and prod him into more brazen attacks on the media.

The irony is that Trump is reflexively incapable of fully taking on board some of the key lessons of his own success from the campaign: The media are in a bubble, they aren’t nearly as important as they used to be, and whatever they are hysterical about in this six-hour news cycle will soon fade in the next. Trump, though, can’t get enough of the bubble and is as short-sightedly consumed with the latest thing as his media nemeses.

Trump clearly feeds off the attention and considers the negative coverage, in part, as a motivator (I’ll show those bastards on CNN …). But his obsession with the coverage also distorts his judgment. The DACA tweet was an unforced error, or, to be more precise, an error forced by cable chatter he should be ignoring.

There are a couple of ways out of the dilemma. Trump can abandon his program and perhaps get some praise for “growing in office” (while destroying his presidency). He can continue, agitated by the coverage, to lash out, sometimes self-defeatingly. Or he can turn off the TV.

The right answer is, “Click!,” but he’s as unlikely to give up the remote as his phone.

