\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a cunning political operator, but even he can\u2019t weaken President Donald Trump\u2019s bond with television. The two leaders are at odds again over Gaza, now because of human-rights-organization warnings of widespread starvation. Under intense international pressure, Netanyahu has allowed some food aid into the region, but he insists that there is \u201cno starvation\u201d in Gaza.<\/p>\n
This morning, before a meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, Trump was asked by reporters whether he agreed with Netanyahu\u2019s assessment. \u201cBased on television, I would say not particularly, because those children look very hungry,\u201d Trump said. Later, he added: \u201cThat\u2019s real starvation stuff. I see it, and you can\u2019t fake that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has arrived at the right conclusion in a terrible way. As president, Trump has access to the most powerful information-gathering network in the world, yet he takes his cues from what he watches on television. This helps him see the news from the same perspective as the general public, which has enabled his political success. But it also narrows his understanding, and it makes him highly susceptible to manipulation.<\/p>\n
In this case, the evidence suggests that Trump is right. Cindy McCain, the executive director of the UN\u2019s World Food Programme, has been warning for months of humanitarian disaster; WFP says one-third of Gazans have not eaten for multiple days in a row. Other organizations say Gaza is on the brink of famine. The Israeli government has defended its restriction of aid by saying that Hamas is pilfering food, but that doesn\u2019t address its responsibility to feed the civilian population caught up in the war. As Hussein Ibish recently wrote in The Atlantic, more than 1,000 Gazans may have been killed since May just trying to get food.<\/p>\n
But Trump had little to say on the matter until it broke through mass media, where images of skeletal adults and children with distended bellies make the point more viscerally than any statistics. The spread of videos and photos has helped force this story to the center of attention, just as previous footage helped turn American opinion against the war in Gaza. Less than a quarter of Americans now say Israeli military actions are \u201cfully justified.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump is attuned to\u2014and responds to\u2014this kind of change in public opinion more than he responds to the substance of underlying events. I often think about testimony from Hope Hicks, Trump\u2019s former press aide, during his trial in Manhattan related to hush money. Prosecutors asked Hicks how Trump reacted in 2016 when The Wall Street Journal reported on his alleged extramarital sexual relationship with Karen McDougal. Hicks couldn\u2019t recall, but added: \u201cI don\u2019t want to speculate, but I\u2019m almost certain he would\u2019ve asked me how\u2019s it playing.\u201d Now, as president, he sometimes approaches news events not as things over which he has control but just like a guy watching from his easy chair, remote in hand: opportunities for punditry, not policy making.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s reverence of television interacts dangerously with his skepticism of anyone who represents independent expertise. \u201cI know more about ISIS than the generals do,\u201d he said in 2015. Former aides say he doesn\u2019t read or pay attention during briefings, and he particularly distrusts the intelligence community, to the point that he has repeatedly taken Vladimir Putin\u2019s word instead. This means that despite access to high-quality information about what\u2019s going on in Gaza, he seems to really perk up only once it\u2019s on the tube.<\/p>\n
Such a narrow information stream is a problem, because TV is not a good source of information on its own; it should be consumed as part of a balanced news diet. That\u2019s especially true for the television channel that Trump seems to consume most, Fox News. (The liberal researcher Matt Gertz painstakingly documented the direct connection between Fox News segments and Trump tweets during his first term.) Various research over many years has found that Fox viewers are less informed than other news consumers.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s reliance on television news presents an easy target for anyone trying to influence him, as Gertz\u2019s research underscores. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina adopted a strategy of going on TV to try to get messages to Trump. \u201cHave you conveyed this personally to the president?\u201d a host once asked him during an interview. \u201cI just did,\u201d Graham answered. Politicians seeking Trump\u2019s support have tried to use TV too. Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, ran ads in Florida when he was up for reelection in 2020 to get them in front of Trump. So have Trump opponents wishing to troll him.<\/p>\n
The fact that the president can be so easily persuaded is concerning enough on its own, and helps explain the policy whiplash during his two presidencies. But it\u2019s especially dangerous in an age of misinformation. I wrote in 2017 about how Trump\u2019s tendency to fall for fake news could cause him trouble. Eight years later, Trump has a White House staff less interested in saving him from himself, and technology has developed to allow for extremely convincing and realistic deepfakes. Trump\u2019s naive belief that you \u201ccan\u2019t fake\u201d what you see on TV is belied by the many tear-jerking but counterfeit AI images that circulate on Facebook. When it comes to Gaza, he has access to much more reliable evidence and warnings from human-rights experts, but those don\u2019t really seem to penetrate.<\/p>\n
News coverage is not the only obsession shaping, or warping, the administration\u2019s approach to Gaza. The president\u2019s inclination to view nearly everything as a potential real-estate deal inspired his bizarre suggestion to clear the strip and turn it into a luxury beachfront development, the \u201cRiviera of the Middle East.\u201d And his poorly concealed fixation on winning the Nobel Peace Prize seems to animate many of his choices in the region. As an added benefit, a Nobel would play well on the news.<\/p>\n
Even as TV news is driving Trump\u2019s worldview, Trump\u2019s worldview is reshaping TV news. Having worked to dominate news coverage for years, Trump now wants to control it directly, as he and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr seek unprecedented control over broadcasters such as CBS. Trump once considered starting his own TV network, but he and the nation\u2019s major broadcasters could instead create a closed loop with Trump taking his tips from channels that do what he says. Who needs facts when you can construct your own reality?<\/p>\n
Related:<\/p>\n
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n Dispatches<\/strong><\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Steph Chambers \/ Getty<\/p>\n The WNBA Has a Good Problem on Its Hands<\/p>\n By Jemele Hill<\/p>\n For the first time in the nearly three-decade history of U.S. professional women\u2019s basketball, its star players have become household names. What would it take for them to get paid accordingly?<\/p>\n While warming up recently for the WNBA All-Star Game, players wore T-shirts that read Pay us what you owe us<\/span>, in reference to the ongoing collective-bargaining negotiations between the players and the league. Until that point, there had not been much buzz about the WNBA\u2019s negotiations, but the shirts had their intended result, taking the players\u2019 labor fight mainstream.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani \/ The Atlantic. Sources: Will Heath \/ NBC \/ NBCU Photo Bank \/ Getty.<\/p>\n Listen. Justin Bieber\u2019s new song, \u201cDaisies,\u201d is not the summer anthem we expected\u2014but it might be the one we need, Spencer Kornhaber writes.<\/p>\n Read. Our assistant editor Luis Parrales shares his culture and entertainment musts\u2014including Mario Vargas Llosa, Alasdair MacIntyre, The Bear, and Conan O\u2019Brien.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n P.S.<\/p>\n Back in May, I wrote about Trump\u2019s plans to accept a white-elephant 747 from Qatar: \u201cIf there\u2019s no such thing as a free lunch, there\u2019s certainly no such thing as a free plane.\u201d I was thinking primarily about what Qatar might expect in return, but in The New York Times, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt report on the more immediate costs of refitting the plane for its new role as Air Force One. No one in government will talk about these costs, Sanger and Schmitt report, but the military appears to be raiding nearly $1 billion from a missile-defense project to pay for Trump\u2019s pet project\u2014all while achieving no savings on the plane. It\u2019s enough to make you wonder just how sincere Trump is about government efficiency.<\/p>\n \u2014 David<\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a cunning political operator, but even he can\u2019t weaken President Donald Trump\u2019s bond<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12821,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[71,6481,6482],"class_list":{"0":"post-12820","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-trumps","9":"tag-warps","10":"tag-worldview"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n