Overstuffed ottoman Donald Trump, whose ego cannot tolerate news reports about the fallout of his historically bad administration, reportedly reads two folders filled with positive press about himself every day that consist of “screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful,” according to Vice News.
Three current and former White House officials told Vice that, every day, Trump gets two folders containing 20-to-25 pages of flattering news to boost his ego, referred to some in the White House as “the Propaganda Document.”
Vice reports:
Beginning at 6 a.m. every weekday — the early start is a longtime war room tradition — three staffers arrive at the RNC to begin monitoring the morning shows on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News as they scour the internet and newspapers. Every 30 minutes or so, the staffers send the White House Communications Office an email with chyron screenshots, tweets, news stories, and interview transcripts.
White House staffers then cull the information, send out clips to other officials, and push favorable headlines to a list of journalists. But they also pick out the most positive bits to give to the president. On days when there aren’t enough positive chyrons, communications staffers begin asking the RNC staffers for flattering photos of the president.
“Maybe it’s good for the country that the president is in a good mood in the morning,” one former RNC official said.
The only feedback the White House communications office has ever received on the folder, per one source, is that it “needs to be more fucking positive.”
When Vice reached out to beleaguered White House veteran Sean Spicer for comment on the folders, Spicer emailed a statement saying, “While I won’t comment on materials we share with the president, this is not accurate on several levels.” He did not, however, specify what the inaccuracies may have been.