Donald Trump’s Dream Palace of Puffery

The President then interrupted him. “Did you ever think I was going to be called the peacemaker?”

Glenn replied, “Actually, I did.”

His question, when he got around to it, was about Alyssa Farah, a former aide in Trump’s first-term White House who is now a co-host of the popular ABC daytime talk show “The View” and a vocal critic of Trump’s. According to Glenn, Farah had promised to wear a Make America Great Again hat on TV if he actually managed to secure the release of Israeli hostages being held in Gaza, but she had not yet done so. After explaining all this to the President, his query to Trump was just two words: “Your response?”

A day later, Glenn was back in front of Trump, at a press conference featuring the President and the director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel. The event’s news, among other things, was Trump complaining that law-enforcement agencies should investigate and prosecute more of his political enemies and confirming that he had secretly ordered the C.I.A. to carry out operations inside Venezuela. Glenn, however, wanted to make a point about one of Trump’s longtime preoccupations—what the President calls the “rigged election” of 2020. “By the way, you won Georgia three times,” Glenn shouted over other reporters trying to ask questions. Ed O’Keefe, of CBS News, standing in front of Glenn, could be seen shaking his head with what appeared to be exasperation. It was the last part of the exchange that really stood out, though. In response to Glenn, Trump said, “Yeah, I agree. Do you agree with me?” After Glenn replied, “I do,” the President quickly jumped back in: “And he’s the media! He’s the media!”

I can think of no more perfect encapsulation of why the Trump Administration has done what it has to eviscerate the century-old tradition of independent reporting from the White House. In his second term, it was no longer enough to call the real news fake; now it’s the fake news that gets to displace actual journalists in order to playact the real thing. And when Trump wants validation, whether for his false claims of election fraud or some other lie, he can now claim “the media” gave it to him. How long can it be until there are only Brian Glenns in that room?

You might think that the Kremlinization of the White House press pool doesn’t really matter at a moment when there are so many other Trump-generated crises in the country. Or that it is simply self-serving of journalists to complain about their own perks being taken away. Or that the President has no obligation, legal or otherwise, to answer questions from anyone. All of which are fair points.

But the reason to pay attention to what’s happening with the coverage of the Presidency is that Trump cares about it perhaps more than anything else. There has never been a more media-obsessed President, nor one for whom the regard of others, even if it is suck-uppery in the crudest form, matters so much. He is known to spend hours a day consuming cable-news reports about himself. There is no detail of his public portrayal that does not concern him. In a lengthy social-media post this week, he berated Time for a cover about his Middle East diplomacy which was so complimentary it was headlined “His Triumph.” Trump’s beef was with the accompanying photo of himself, which he deemed “the Worst of All Time.” The point being: there is no pleasing a leader whose need for affirmation is so bottomless.

The template for Trump’s second term so far has been to remake the White House as a place increasingly devoid of constraints or criticism. Gone are the first-term advisers such as John Kelly or Jim Mattis who saw themselves as checks on Trump’s tendency to go rogue. Only yes-men and flatterers need apply, and more and more they seem to be competing with one another to come up with the most over-the-top compliments possible for the boss. Last weekend, during a rally in Tel Aviv to celebrate the Trump-brokered deal to release the Israeli hostages, Trump’s Middle East negotiator, Steve Witkoff, proclaimed him “the greatest President in American history.” It doesn’t take much imagination to think what talk like that from his advisers does to a man with Trump’s ego. Those questions from reporters may soon be the last thing left tethering the President to at least some form of reality.

This is why it’s not hard to anticipate where all this is going. Trump, it appears, is building a dream palace of endless puffery for himself, a gilded safe space where there will be no more tough questions, no more pesky reporters or impertinent demands for information that he does not want to give. And imagine how very powerful the President, who already believes the Constitution gives him the power “to do whatever I want,” will feel then. The Pentagon’s move to effectively ban journalism from its halls this week was not an outlier—it was a preview. ♦