President Donald Trump is often mocked for spending so much time watching television, an addiction that distinguishes him not only from his predecessor, Barack Obama, but all other presidents. Yet Trump’s relationship with TV—which extends to fannish shout-outs to shows he likes (like Fox and Friends) and mockery of the low ratings of shows that criticize him (like the Emmys)—might explain not just his singular path to the presidency, but his continued hold on his supporters. “He believes that television producers, especially of highly rated shows, understand what the public is interested in—what it fears, what it wants, what it loves,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in a recent interview. “And so TV programming in some ways is a more accurate reflection of the public mood than polling. That’s his view, he said it to me. And that’s one of the reasons he watches a lot of television.”

Trump is truly the first TV president, in ways that go far deeper than his viewing habits. While earlier presidents, notably John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, benefited from being telegenic, they were still tied to an earlier, pre-television world in ways that Trump isn’t. (If Kennedy was the magazine-star president, Reagan was the film-star president.) He’s a pure product of the age of television, someone whose mental horizon is the screen. And television isn’t just a passive medium for Trump, his main source for understanding how Americans think. As the star of the long-running reality show The Apprentice, where he played the tough, no-nonsense boss who relishes firing people, Trump actively used TV to shape how millions of Americans think of him.

As Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen argued in The Washington Post last year, Trump’s ties to TV made it hard for print journalists to understand his appeal. “The conversations in TV and radio land were barely visible within text-based journalism,” Allen contended. “Some of those conversations involved sustained criticism of the cultural authority of newspapers and universities. That criticism targeted the professional norms of these sectors, which now include a widespread commitment to gender and racial equality as well as to social equality in relation to sexual identity. That TV and radio land conversation also stirs up great attraction for towering figures of that landscape—Trump, for instance.”

It’s not just that Trump is a creature of TV, but that he’s also allergic to text. Tony Schwartz told The New Yorker that in the 18 months he spent with Trump co-writing The Art of the Deal, he never saw a single book in Trump’s office or apartment. In May of 2016, when Megyn Kelly asked him to name the last book he’d read, Trump said, “I read passages, I read areas, chapters, I don’t have the time.” He told the Post two months later that he doesn’t have time to read books: “I never have. I’m always busy doing a lot. Now I’m more busy, I guess, than ever before.” By early this year, The New York Times was stating it as accepted fact: “Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.” The president even has trouble digesting briefing books, so his aides now use “big pictures” and “killer graphics” to hold his attention. Trump is truly a malevolent version of Chauncey Gardiner, the TV-addicted naif of Jerzy Kosinski’s 1970s novel Being There, who ends up being elected president thanks to his ability to repeat banalities he’s heard on the boob tube and in ordinary conversation. The question is whether he’s an outlier in this regard, or a harbinger of a post-literate American politics.

The rise of television as a mass medium in the 1950s sparked the rise of media studies in general, led by Marshall McLuhan, a literary-theorist turned cultural guru. McLuhan and his followers argue that television is no mere entertainment appliance, but helped initiate a central shift from the age of typographic culture (when print shaped and structured how we saw to world) to our contemporary post-literate world. In books like The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan recast the conventional history of Western Civilization with a technological-determinist bent, tracing the movement from orality to literacy to post-literacy. The implications of these shifts were interrogated by major literary scholars like Neil Postman, Walter Ong, and Hugh Kenner.