You may have caught the New York Times article about Donald Trump on the weekend which alleged – among other things – that the president watches between 4 – 8 hours of television a day, cooking his brain in the swamp of cable news. The article suggested hat Trump wakes up at 5:30am and immediately switches on his TV, often while propped up on his pillows to volley off some rude tweets.
The article also delved into the fortress mentality in the White House, where Trump seems paralysed by his compulsion to lash out at anyone who has wronged him instead of, you know, governing. Allegedly, chief of staff John Kelly does his best to get Trump into the Oval Office as early as possible, with “controlled” information on his desk so he doesn’t spend his time tweeting about random shit he’s seen.
But it’s the TV claim that Trump’s particularly furious about. He sent off a tweet today rejecting the claim that he watches eight hours of TV a day like some kind of enormous teenager:
Another false story, this time in the Failing @nytimes, that I watch 4-8 hours of television a day – Wrong! Also, I seldom, if ever, watch CNN or MSNBC, both of which I consider Fake News. I never watch Don Lemon, who I once called the “dumbest man on television!” Bad Reporting.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 11, 2017
This isn’t the first time Trump has become furious at the suggestion that he watches a lot of TV – a hard claim to deny considering the fact a huge chunk of his tweets are about things he’s seen on telly. On a recent trip to Vietnam, Trump said he didn’t watch much TV because he was too busy reading unspecified “documents”.
I do not watch much television. I know they like to say — people that don’t know me — they like to say I watch television. People with fake sources — you know, fake reporters, fake sources. But I don’t get to watch much television, primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents a lot.
Documents, folks! They’re a real time-sink!
It’s good that the President of the United States is a racist teenager with poor impulse control. This can only end well.
