I offer two pieces of evidence. The first comes from an excerpt of the Trump book written by Washington Post staff that is due out this month:

All told, over the past four months, Trump spent more than 20 hours talking to Washington Post reporters who were working on a biography, titled “Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power,” which will be published by Scribner on Aug. 23 . Trump was gracious and generous with his time, took nearly all of our questions, and often extended the length of our interviews, sometimes doubling or tripling the allotted time. That level of cooperation was a surprising switch from the campaign’s initial reaction to the book.

The second comes from the New York Times' brutal piece over the weekend on the state of Trump's campaign (bolding is mine):

In private, Mr. Trump’s mood is often sullen and erratic, his associates say. He veers from barking at members of his staff to grumbling about how he was better off following his own instincts during the primaries and suggesting he should not have heeded their calls for change. He broods about his souring relationship with the news media, calling Mr. Manafort several times a day to talk about specific stories. Occasionally, Mr. Trump blows off steam in bursts of boyish exuberance: At the end of a fund-raiser on Long Island last week, he playfully buzzed the crowd twice with his helicopter.

The picture of Trump those vignettes paint is very different than the one the candidate presents at his rallies. It's one of a candidate who cares deeply about how he is perceived by the national news media and who feels some level of betrayal for the way he is being covered.

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Trump is far from alone in using the media as a scapegoat publicly while courting it privately. Most politicians — especially over the past decade or so as the media has grown increasingly less popular — employ some version of this tactic.

What makes Trump unique is both the level of his public vitriol toward the media and his deep private need for its approval.

No politician in modern memory has been as aggressively negative about the media — and encouraged that same behavior in his supporters. In addition to banning certain outlets — including this one — from covering his events, Trump's attacks are deeply personal in a way that most politicians typically avoid. And those attacks spark remarkably angry reactions from those who support him.

And yet, Trump has, throughout his career, been obsessed with that same media in private. He is a lifelong resident of New York, the media capital of the world. He cares — and always has — about what "Page Six" and the New York Times write about him. He cares about what Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski say about him on "Morning Joe." Every profile of Trump makes clear that he is a voracious consumer of news. (I've made the point before that he watches more cable TV than just about anyone.) Any and every conversation with Trump is peppered with references to favorable (or unfavorable) things some media outlet has written about him. He is as focused on the media as any politician who has ever run for president.

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Now, remember that the opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifference. And Trump is anything but indifferent about the media. What Trump says publicly is schtick; he is like a comedian delivering a well-worn punchline because he knows it works, not because he deeply believes it or loves the line. The way he acts privately betrays just how much he cares about the media and how they cover/regard him.