Nine months into his first term, President Trump is perfecting a style of leadership commensurate with his campaign promise to disrupt business as usual in Washington. Call it governing by cattle prod.
.. In the face of his own unhappiness, the president is trying to raise the pain level wherever he can.
.. He cares about ratings, praise and success. Absent demonstrable achievements, he reverts to what worked during the campaign, which is to depend on his own instincts and to touch the hot buttons that roused his voters in 2016. As president, he has never tried seriously to reach beyond that base.
.. Trump has managed to turn an issue that once was about police violence in minority communities into a cultural battle about patriotism, the flag and pride in the military. His critics are now on the defensive.
.. There’s little doubt that part of the president’s motivation is to undo what former president Barack Obama did. He campaigned against Obamacare, although his prescriptions for what should replace it lacked consistency or, for that matter, clear alternatives
.. he has decided to force Congress to act on whether to fund the insurance subsidies that help lower-income Americans purchase health insurance. That’s another way he’s trying to bring the Democrats to the table,
.. Trump is trying to ratchet up attention to those problems but by threatening to walk away from the nuclear agreement has created a rift with U.S. partners
.. Foreign policy experts worry that by opening up a new confrontation with Iran, the administration may be stretching its capacity to handle both matters with the patience, skill and delicacy they require.
.. The president has proved himself capable and willing to start controversies and policy confrontations. That’s what being a disrupter is all about. But there is more to the presidency than initiating conflict, and on that measure, Trump has much to prove.
For Trump, the Reality Show Has Never Ended
Mr. Trump’s West Wing has always seemed to be the crossroads between cutthroat politics and television drama, presided over by a seasoned showman who has made a career of keeping the audience engaged and coming back for more. Obsessed by ratings and always on the hunt for new story lines, Mr. Trump leaves the characters on edge, none of them ever really certain whether they might soon be voted off the island.
“Absolutely, I see those techniques playing out,” said Laurie Ouellette, a communications professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied reality television extensively. “Reality TV is known for its humiliation tactics and its aggressive showmanship and also the idea that either you’re in or you’re out, with momentum building to the final decision on who stays and who goes.”
.. dismissed Mr. Corker on Tuesday by mocking his height and suggesting he had somehow been conned. “The Failing @nytimes set Liddle’ Bob Corker up by recording his conversation,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Was made to sound a fool, and that’s what I am dealing with!”
.. Mr. Trump later denied that he had demeaned his secretary of state. “I didn’t undercut anybody. I don’t believe in undercutting people,” he told reporters, in a comment that must have amused the many people he has undercut since taking office.
.. “With Jemele Hill at the mike, it is no wonder ESPN ratings have ‘tanked,’ in fact, tanked so badly it is the talk of the industry!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter.
.. Andy Cohen, the creator of the “Real Housewives” reality television show franchise, found that too rich. “This is actually happening,” he wrote on Twitter. “All the wives are fighting. Even I AM SPEECHLESS.”
.. This has exceeded what would have been allowed on ‘The Apprentice,’” she said. “It’s almost a magnification. It’s like reality TV unleashed. Yes, he was good at it, but I always felt like he had to be reined in in order not to mess up the formula. Here, he doesn’t have that same sort of constraint.”
Donald Trump’s complicated relationship with technology
The incoming president has mastered Twitter, but he doesn’t do email and rarely uses a computer.
Trump’s strange analysis this week of the Russian hacking scandal — “computers have complicated lives very greatly” and “nobody knows exactly what is going on” — sounded wildly out of sync with the tech-obsessed culture that Trump has so expertly tapped into through Twitter.
.. When conservative commentator Erick Erickson wrote a column last December that pleased Trump, he wanted to send Erickson an email. So Trump scribbled a note with a black Sharpie and had his assistant make a digital scan of the note and email it to Erickson.“He’s the only one who’s ever sent me an email like that,” Erickson said, laughing. “He considers email a distraction.”.. Erickson added: “He gets his emails printed out, and he reads and annotates them and sends them back as a PDF.” Current and former aides say that is standard practice.
.. Stone said Trump is “obsessed with Twitter” and has “great instincts” because he watches TV so much and understands ratings.
.. Trump told Erickson and others that email is a problem because people waste their day on it and it only opens them up to trouble. He has talked to aides and friends about business executives who were damaged by emails at trials and other politicians, like Hillary Clinton, Anthony Weiner and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who have brought themselves trouble via email.
Comedy Central Cancels Larry Wilmore’s Late-Night Show
Though the late-show genre remains heavy on easygoing laughter, any one episode of “The Nightly Show” could occasionally go for prolonged stretches without a single joke, something that intrigued some critics but failed to attract a broader audience.
.. “The Daily Show” had an average of 2.1 million viewers a night in Mr. Stewart’s final year as host, while Mr. Noah’s audience has averaged 1.3 million, according to data from Nielsen... “The Colbert Report,” he had an average audience of 1.7 million viewers, but in Mr. Wilmore’s first year, that viewership fell to an average of 922,000 viewers, according to Nielsen. This year, the total has fallen to 776,000 viewers a night... Mr. Alterman said that he had hoped that there would be a ratings surge — particularly around the political conventions — and that the decision to cancel “The Nightly Show” was a recent one... Calling the perception that Mr. Noah is struggling “a myth,” Mr. Alterman pointed to the show’s strong performance on Hulu — though he is not allowed to disclose figures, he said... Mr. Noah’s show is the No. 2 late-night show among young adults ages 18 to 34,