Can’t Stop Talking

Why Trump Can’t Stop Talking to the Press

The president’s post-election interview binge, explained.

By JACK SHAFER

Whenever I’m stressed, I overeat. When circumstances overwhelm President Donald Trump’s psyche, he self-medicates by giving sit-down interviews with the press.

Setting aside the usual press gaggles, in the past six weeks Trump has given extensive interviews to The Associated Press, 60 Minutes, Politico, the Washington Post, the Daily Caller, the Wall Street Journal, the Wall Street Journal again, Fox News Sunday, Fox & Friends, Fox News @ Night, Sean Hannity, The Ingraham Angle, Fox Business News, Fox Business News again, New York magazine, the New York Post, and ABC News. And that’s just the short list. Trump displays no indication that he’s spoken his piece. In fact, he was deriving so much crisis-soothing pleasure from his 46-minute October 11 phoner on Fox & Friends that co-host Steve Doocy finally had to give him the hook. “Go run the country,” he told Trump. If Doocy hadn’t thrown up that stop sign, Trump might have talked into the afternoon, through Shepard Smith’s program, and into the evening Fox line-up.

Lord knows Trump has a right to be frazzled. Robert Mueller, after all, is on his tail. The WikiLeaks connection is blowing up. General Motors is closing plants. A recession has been sighted on the horizon and the stock market is in the swirly. It’s possible his favorite son will be indicted. The Mexican border has sprung a leak. He’s unhappy with his Cabinet and chief of staff. His Saudi buddies have gone murderously rogue. The Democrats took the House of Representatives and promise to investigate the bejesus out of him starting in January, and there is nothing he can do to stop them.

Trump relishes interviews because they allow him to change the subject to deflect whatever crisis has swamped him. He’s been turning to reporter interviews to relieve himself of the pain of his bankruptcy and divorce problems since his Manhattan days. To return to the self-soothing theme, interviews put an interviewee like Trump in control if he schemes ahead of time to inject fresh news material into the agenda. Trump did this Tuesday when he slagged the head of the Federal Reserve in his Washington Post interview and again on Wednesday when he told the New York Post that a Paul Manafort pardon is “not off the table.” Besides manipulating the news agenda, interviews make him look presidential, especially when conducted inside the stately confines of the White House. Every time a reporter genuflects to Trump by reverentially prefacing their questions with the words, “Mr. President,” he wins a small public relations victory.

As my former colleague Annie Karni wrote last month, the blitzkrieg of interviews is part of a calculated White House media strategy. Having churned through a dozen communications directors in his administration, he’s finally decided that he should play that role. By communicating his views directly and spontaneously, Trump feels as though he’s tossed off the shackles of those White House aides who would control him. “It’s also a strategy that appears more accessible than it really is: It allows Trump to dictate the terms of the interactions with the news media, rather than vice versa,” Karni wrote.

Another reason for the burst of blather is that he doesn’t have anything else to do! Trump has more free time in his daily schedule than a lazy student attending a hippie alternative high school. In a recent Politico article, Eliana Johnson and Daniel Lippman wrote of the days in which Trump allots to himself up to nine hours of “Executive Time,” in which he tweets, phones friends, watches TV and otherwise dawdles. Trump delights in the performative aspects of being president—conducting political rallies, signing bills in elaborate ceremonies, giving awards, presiding over his Cabinet in televised sessions, dreaming of military parades in downtown Washington, D.C. Reading white papers, enduring endless briefings, attending countless meetings and puzzling through policy options are not his idea of what the job is about. Popping off the cuff to reporters while drinking a Diet Coke in the Oval Office is a lot more like it.

Journalists lust for interviews because they believe they can pierce all the filibustering and obfuscations with questions that strike their subjects like armor-penetrating bombs. But reviewing the latest batch of presidential sit-downs, such penetration is rare in the reign of Trump. He can’t be shamed into answering questions he doesn’t want to answer, nor can he be maneuvered into confessing a contradiction. As we’ve learned over the past three years, Trump has a jazz riff for every pointed question posed. In Trump’s mind, there is no difference between being grilled by a Washington Post reporter or phoning in to answer queries from his Fox & Friends sycophants. He considers both sales opportunities, and as a devoted salesman, he’s willing to talk until sunset and beyond even if you signal you’re not in the market to buy.