Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Top aides to President Donald Trump were horrified at the quantity of cable news the president consumes on a daily basis and tried and failed to prevent his furious responses to the television news coverage, The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward reports in his forthcoming book.

Media Matters obtained a copy of Woodward’s book, Fear: Trump in the White House, which is scheduled for release September 11. Woodward provides a damning look at the inner workings of the Trump White House based on what the author describes as hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand participants as well as meeting notes, personal diaries, and government documents.

The view Woodward’s book provides is one of an unhinged, ignorant, unpredictable president careening from disaster to disaster while his aides, fully aware of his moral and intellectual unfitness for the office, strain to prevent him from exercising his worst impulses. At times, that internal effort to constrain Trump involved extraconstitutional measures -- including removing documents from the president’s desk and ignoring his orders -- in what Woodward describes as an “administrative coup d’etat.”

As part of this effort, Woodward reports, top White House aides strove to limit the president’s exposure to cable news. The president would often spend six to eight hours a day -- particularly in the morning and on the weekend -- watching his supporters at Fox News or the “enemy networks, MSNBC and CNN” -- getting angry and firing off hyperaggressive tweets. Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff, altered the president’s schedule in order to limit his time in the presidential bedroom, which he termed “the devil’s workshop.” Per Woodward:

There was not much he could do about the mornings, but he had some control over the weekend schedule. He started scheduling Trump's Sunday returns to the White House later in the afternoon. Trump would get to the White House just before 9 p.m. when MSNBC and CNN generally turned to softer programming that did not focus on the immediate political controversies and Trump's inevitable role in them.

Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, repeatedly confronted the president about his cable news fixation, on one occasion urging him to spend his weekends “play[ing] some slap and tickle with Melania” rather than raging at CNN coverage.

The president’s aides are right to be concerned. As Media Matters has documented extensively, Trump's furious tweets frequently come when he responds to Fox programming he is watching in near-real time.

Woodward describes a series of scenes in which the president watches cable news -- particularly Fox -- and then lashes out. At times, Trump is depicted shifting his communications strategy or threatening to make personnel decisions on the basis of what he sees on the television. In other cases, he simply explodes at whoever is around him -- on two different occasions, Woodward uses the phrase “Trump went through the roof” to describe his response to the coverage.

Here are Woodward’s depictions of the president responding to cable news coverage, and, where possible, the television segments to which he was apparently reacting.

Trump unnerved by Fox B-roll of North Korea missile launch

On March 7, 2017, Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) were having lunch in the president’s dining room with two senior White House aides. A Fox segment featuring North Korea missile launches two days earlier that was playing on the room’s television jarred Trump, turning his eyes “as big as silver dollars” before Graham told him that it was “old footage.” Graham used the segment to urge the president to pressure China into preventing North Korea from building more advanced missiles. From Fear: Trump in the White House:

Suddenly everyone’s attention was drawn to four North Korean missiles shooting across the giant TV screen. Just days before, on March 5, North Korea had fired four missiles into the Sea of Japan. Trump's eyes were as big as silver dollars. “That's old footage, old footage," Graham said, trying to calm everyone. He had seen it before. “I've got to do something about this,” Trump said, pointing to the screen. “That day is coming," Graham said. “What are you going to do about it?” “What do you think I should do about it?” he asked. “You can accept they've got a missile and tell them and China that if you ever use it, that's the end of North Korea,” Graham said. “And have a missile defense system that has a high percentage of knocking it down. That's scenario one. Scenario two is that you tell China that we're not going to let them get such a missile to hit our homeland. And if you don't take care of it, I will." “What would you do?” the president asked. It had to be the second option, Graham said. You can't let them have that capability. Number one is too risky.

Here’s a segment that tracks closely with Woodward's description, which aired at 1:14 p.m. EST that day: