White House schedules have shown the president tends to skip his daily security briefings, but when it comes to cable news headlines, called chyrons, President Donald Trump wants to see them all.
According to a Sunday Axios report, the president has his print off the chyrons so that he can see what's happening on the cable news channels every day. The news comes from Cliff Sims' new book Team of Vipers, which is scheduled to be released Jan. 29.
"He consumed TV like the late Roger Ebert must have watched movies," Axios quoted from the book. "He commented on the sets, the graphics, the wardrobe choices, the lighting, and just about every other visual component of a broadcast. Sure, he liked to hear pundits saying nice things about him or White House officials defending him from attacks, but everything came back to how does it look?"
The book says the most "Trumpian tactic" that the communications team attempted was lobbying networks about the headlines that appear on the lower third of their screen.
"'People watch TV on mute,' the President told me, 'so it’s those words, those sometimes beautiful, sometimes nasty little words that matter,'" Sims wrote.
It extends to Trump's speeches as well. The team would take screen captures of the chyrons while Trump is making a speech and then ads them to "headlines and tweets from influential reporters and pundits.
"They would race to print out a packet before Trump made it back to the White House," the book reads.
The goal was for someone in the communications team to meet Trump on the ground floor of the residence and hand him the packet.