Trump's TV Obsession Is a First
No president has consumed as much television as the current one, or reacted as quickly or directly to what they were seeing.
President Trump loves
Fox & Friends. At 6:24 a.m. on Monday, Trump gushed on Twitter about the “amazing reporting” on the morning talk show. A week earlier he
instructed the nation to “watch @foxandfriends now” for their exemplary Russia coverage. He tweeted about the program, hosted by Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt, and Brian Kilmeade, seven times in March alone, and recently brought it up in an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, telling him cheerfully, “I like that group of three people.”
Even after becoming president, Trump reportedly manages to fill his days with “
plenty of television,” and from his tweets, it’s often
possible to discern when—and what—he’s watching. In January,
Axios broke down the president’s media diet:
Based on their breakdown and this
visual guide made by
The Washington Post,
Trump watches an average of five hours of television every day. That’s almost the same amount the average American aged 50-64 watches daily,
according to Nielsen. Trump’s habits don’t quite match up with those of his cohort—Americans in Trump’s age bracket (65+) watch roughly seven hours of TV a day. But many of them are retired, and Trump is the president of the United States. No former president seems to have spent this much time glued to his television set.
... and when he's done watching five hours of television a day, he's just starting twittering about what he's seen.