Stripped of Twitter, Trump faces new challenge: how to get attention

Over the years of his presidency, as controversies and investigations into his conduct began to escalate, television became a less reliable safe space. The broadcast networks, in a hurry to be more aggressive in their approach to him and his collaborators, asked more difficult questions. With the exception of Fox News, cable networks that rushed to air him throughout 2016 and the early stages of his presidency have been cracked down, including curtailing the broadcast of his live appearances.

And his adventures in the White House briefing room did not generally go well and exposed the limits of his understanding of politics or current affairs. A Trump adviser was outspoken, saying the president dislikes most aspects of his job, which involved being asked questions he didn’t know the answers to.

So when Mr. Trump walked into the briefing room for weeks in the spring to discuss the coronavirus, advisers said, he liked the visual aspects of his performance but not the reality of having a go-and-go. comes that led to him being condemned and ridiculed for his dangerous statements about fighting the virus with bleach and light and his no-fact claims that everything is better.

Twitter became a stage he could handle more tightly.

It was telling that throughout his tenure, Mr. Trump chose his @realdonaldtrump account as his primary Twitter channel, not his official @Potus account. He understood the power to build his personal brand and separate it from his official duties as president. Twitter gave him a singular outlet to express himself as he is, unfiltered by presidency standards.

He was scrolling through his own Twitter feed, looking at replies for new topics to throw away. He studied Twitter’s trending lists as signals of the direction of speech.

In a way, television became the medium through which he could watch the effects of his tweets.

The television in her alcove dining room next to the Oval Office was usually lit in the background, catnip for its brief attention span. He consumed much of his information and watched the coverage of his tweets.

Trump’s White House aides have said he loves to tweet and then watch the chyrons on cable news channels change quickly in response. For a 70-year-old whose closest allies and helpers say he often exhibits the emotional development of a preteen, and for whom the attention has been astonishing, the instant gratification of his tweets was hard to match.