New Book Details Trump’s Obsession With The Press

The Guardian reports:

A new book depicts Donald Trump as a media obsessive who measures his staff’s loyalty by how well they defended him on television. But despite his Twitter habit, he rarely looks at the web.

A copy of Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War Over the Truth by Howard Kurtz, a host and media critic on the president’s favored Fox News network, was obtained by the Guardian ahead of its publication on Monday.

It tells of a period in which Trump would phone his son-in-law Jared Kushner every morning and ask: “Did you read the fucking New York Times?” Kushner assured him the paper did not matter.

The president, Kurtz writes, begins his day with four newspapers: the Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. He watches the daily White House press briefing and uses the TiVo personal video recorder to catch up on cable shows he has missed. Communications director Hope Hicks, who has Google alerts set up for key names, sometimes shows him clips on her phone.