For President Trump, this is the tree-falls-in-the-forest moment of his administration. If the most television-addicted president in history suddenly finds the cameras missing, is he really still president? Not the kind he has been, anyway.
Mr. Trump, for whom television is better than any narcotic, finds himself for the first time at least partially deprived of the major networks that have covered nearly every movement and utterance he has made for more than a decade. No longer can he snap his fingers and appear live in millions of homes. No longer does he totally dominate the airwaves.
Indeed, his first taste of life without the major television networks that are now boycotting the White House press pool in protest of his ban on select news outlets was a sour one. He was left almost literally shouting into the wind on Monday as he cut the ribbon on his new helipad on the South Lawn of the White House, recorded only by a second-tier news broadcaster that could not capture his voice over the roar of Marine One. There was Mr. Trump moving his mouth, and no one could hear him.
Yet when it comes to attracting attention, the president still manages to find a way. By the end of the day, there he was live on CNN after all — not filmed by the White House television pool, which refused to follow him, but by other cameras that met him when he arrived in New York and were not part of the boycott agreement. He had to rely on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to get on air, not at his own White House but as a guest at Gracie Mansion in the heart of liberal America. But he crowed that he could still force his way onto the screen.
“They said they’re going to boycott me, but they never boycott me, so I wasn’t very worried about that,” Mr. Trump boasted with the mayor at his side and a large group of reporters in front of him. “Look at all that press.”
The moment reinforced the challenge of carrying out any kind of television blackout on the president in an age of proliferating media, and the limits of the news industry’s willingness to cut him off. While pool cameras will be gone for now, the networks under their agreement may still show footage from other sources that are not subject to White House control, like the United Nations camera feed that will carry his speech to the General Assembly on Tuesday.
But the walkout by the five major networks that follow the president everywhere he goes still represents a threat to the way Mr. Trump has governed.Television has been central to his rise to fame and power. His 14 seasons on reality television made him into a national force and helped propel him to the White House. His 10 seasons on political television since then have allowed him to dominate American life in a way that none of his predecessors ever did.
“This is the most important thing for Trump,” said Ramin Setoodeh, the author of “Apprentice in Wonderland,” a history of Mr. Trump’s career on reality TV. “When I interviewed him for my book, he told me the only thing that matters is ratings. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good person or a bad person. If you have good ratings, you’re successful.”
So to lose the network cameras, even if just for now and even if he can get around it some of the time, is a blow to his sense of self, Mr. Setoodeh said. “To him, this is equal to being canceled. This is equal to having a hit show and having the networks pull it from the lineup.”
“This is a real crisis for the president,” Mr. Setoodeh added.
The crisis, of course, is one of his making, stemming from his abrupt decision to bar CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds because of their “negative” coverage, a prohibition he himself called a “ban on the free press.” The five networks that make up the rotating pool that provides television coverage of the president’s events — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC — decided to stop filming him, to demonstrate their objections.
The showdown could be resolved soon if a lawsuit filed by the three barred outlets finds quick favor in court. The case was assigned to Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee who ordered the White House to restore press credentials to CNN’s Jim Acosta during Mr. Trump’s first term. The judge scheduled a hearing for Wednesday, and Mr. Trump seemed to anticipate losing, announcing on social media that he would appeal even though no ruling had been issued.
Mr. Trump was clear that his decision was based on nothing more than his personal pique. “Virtually every story about me, or anything having to do with me, is negative, wrong and, in many cases, DANGEROUS for our Country!” he complained on social media. “No matter how GREAT my Achievements, they trivialize and demean.”
The White House did not comment on how it would respond to the absence of the major networks, but few expected Mr. Trump to take their disappearance with equanimity.
“Attention is Trump’s oxygen,” said Mark McKinnon, who was a media consultant for President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. “And there is no greater attention magnet and magnifier than television. So it is hard to imagine Donald Trump content for very long to have his main source of energy unplugged.”
The fact that the helipad ribbon-cutting would be the first moment when Mr. Trump would pay the price of his decision was especially rich. He has been exceedingly proud of his construction projects and relishes showing them off. Indeed, he has displayed the helipad more than once already, bursting with glee about its virtues. Not having the network cameras present for the big unveiling had to sting.
The only television cameras that did show up were from the White House itself, and less prominent outlets, such as Newsmax. The video was instantly mocked because of the bad sound. Even a Newsmax anchor said on air that the episode indicated that the president’s media ban was “backfiring just a little bit.” (The New York Times and other print outlets refused to publish still photos from the event as well.)
“He’s got to be furious there’s no video with good audio from a consequential day,” said Alyssa Farah Griffin, who was Mr. Trump’s White House communications director in his first term, before breaking with him. “He doesn’t see the value of doing things other than for the camera.”
She added that she would “hate to be that staffer to tell him” what had happened with the ribbon-cutting.
Mr. Trump then flew to New York for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, and met first with Mr. Mamdani. None of the major networks traveled with him on Air Force One, nor were they planning to be present at his meetings with foreign counterparts over the next day. If the dispute remains unresolved, Mr. Trump will return to Washington to host Xi Jinping, China’s leader, on Wednesday and Thursday without network cameras present.
“As far as I know, there is no precedent either for a president to ban cameras or networks — or for networks to boycott an event in solidarity with their banned colleagues,” said Harold Holzer, the author of “The Presidents vs. the Press” and the director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. “I was waiting for that to happen but honestly despaired of it. Thrilled to see it.”
While some presidents were also obsessed with television — Lyndon B. Johnson famously had a custom-made cabinet with three sets in the Oval Office so he could watch all of the network evening newscasts simultaneously — few have craved its attention, or benefited from it, as much as Mr. Trump.
Some even made a point of not checking it out personally, to avoid getting angry. Mr. Bush told television reporters that he did not watch their broadcasts, including even his daughter, Jenna Bush Hager, a host on NBC’s “Today” show. “He says things like, ‘I don’t watch your dumb show,’” she once revealed. Barack Obama tuned into ESPN’s “SportsCenter” religiously, but not the news networks. “I have not watched cable news in 15 years,” he said last year.
Not Mr. Trump. When he first arrived in the White House, he installed a 60-inch screen in the dining room off the Oval Office, along with a DirecTV Genie HD DVR that he called his “Super TiVo,” because it let him record multiple shows at once. He kept the television on throughout much of the day, even during meetings — with the sound down. When The New York Times reported in his first year in office that he watched at least four hours a day, he angrily denied it. But some close to him later suggested that the number underestimated his screen consumption.
Mr. Trump loves television so much that one former aide compared him to Mike Teavee, the television-obsessed kid in Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book who persuades Willy Wonka to transport him into a television set. Mr. Trump thinks about lighting and angles so much that he has been known to study iPad images of himself before starting a television interview, to check the best camera position. He prefers to be seen from his right side so that the part in his hair does not show.
Television is also how his allies communicate with him. Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who died in July, often said that if he needed to get through to the president, he would appear on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, knowing that the president would see. A current cabinet secretary confided to a former Republican official that his best chance to talk directly with Mr. Trump comes during the phone call that reliably follows a television appearance.
In Mr. Trump’s view, television has worked well for him. He was such a master of the medium that in his first campaign, cable networks would air live images of an empty podium waiting for him to appear. Producers knew that he would say something provocative, and that ratings were good.
But the ratings are not what they once were. When Mr. Trump headlined a midterm Republican convention this month, he boasted that “the overall numbers beat the NFL.” In fact, only three million viewers tuned in to Mr. Trump’s speech the first night, compared with 25 million who watched the Seattle Seahawks edge past the New England Patriots.
With the networks on the sidelines, the White House tried to compensate by promoting its own live feed online, branding it “Trump TV,” essentially a form of state television. “Get real-time updates and live events streamed DIRECTLY to your phone,” it wrote on social media. “No noise. Just the news that matters most — straight from the Trump Administration.”
Mr. Trump, of course, is all about the noise. And when he turns on his television and does not see his helipad or other events, the question is what kind of noise he will make then.
