There’s a question President Trump likes to ask people around him when he’s facing a major challenge or considering a big decision. It’s not “Why did this happen?” or “What are my options?” or anything so straightforward as “How does this affect American interests?” It’s a more impressionistic question; any answer might sound equally authoritative, even if only one answer is preferred.
“How’s it playing?”
Trump posed it soon after Israel launched its first attacks against Iran. The president “asked an ally how the Israeli strikes were ‘playing,’” The Times reported. “He said that ‘everyone’ was telling him he needed to get more involved.”
Trump made the same query shortly after surviving an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., last summer. Dan Scavino, the president’s deputy chief of staff, later recalled that it was the first thing Trump asked him when Scavino went to the hospital and showed him the iconic photograph of a blood-streaked presidential candidate pumping his fist in the air. “Hey, Dan, how’s it playing?” Trump asked.
It was also his question after his 2023 indictment — the first ever of a former U.S. president — on charges of falsifying business records to hide a payments to a porn star. In his recent book, “All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America,” Michael Wolff reports that Trump asked his lawyers, before the drive to the courthouse, “How’s it playing?” (In her testimony in the case, Hope Hicks, a former aide to the president, acknowledged that though she did not recall exactly what Trump said to her after The Wall Street Journal reported on the hush money, “I’m almost certain he would’ve asked me how’s it playing.”)
According to Wolff, Trump tried to rank the relative play of two events normally considered disastrous for a politician. “Do you think indictment is bigger than impeachment?” he asked an aide. The aide tried to distinguish the legal jeopardy of indictment versus the political risk of impeachment, which wasn’t what Trump had in mind. “Everyone understands that by ‘bigger,’ Trump means is it playing bigger — more drama, more attention?” Wolff writes. “That’s the answer he wants: It’s bigger because it’s bigger!”
There is nothing wrong with a president gauging public reaction to or support for administration policies or actions. The people are his constituents, after all. It makes sense to assess popular perceptions through, say, polling, or to canvass opinions from trusted advisers, or to rally national sentiment through speeches, posts or some other communications strategy. (When presidents or political candidates insist that they don’t pay attention to polls, all that means is that they saw the polls and didn’t like what they said.)
But in the case of Trump, “How’s it playing?” appears to play an outsize role in his decisions. External approval is not just a means to pursue a policy he deems wise or worthy; the approval is what makes the policy wise or worthy.
In an interview about her 2022 book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The Times, described the process through which Trump typically makes decisions. “There are people around him who recognize that he is often playing to the room, the crowd,” she said on “The Daily Show.” Whether it concerned his stance on mask mandates or his views on football players kneeling during the national anthem, “it’s always in response to, how’s it playing,” Haberman said.
If “how’s it playing” is such a vital consideration, the key question becomes, well, playing with whom? Who are the audiences Trump cares about most?
The Times’s coverage of Trump’s decision to strike Iran indicates that the president and his aides tracked how top supporters on social media viewed possible U.S. action. The president was also focused on Fox News, which featured constant praise of Israel’s attack on Iran, with guests encouraging deeper U.S. involvement. Some of the president’s advisers lamented that Tucker Carlson, who vehemently opposed a U.S. war against Iran, was no longer on the conservative news network, “which meant,” The Times reported, “that Mr. Trump was not hearing much of the other side of the debate.”
This is a longtime pattern for the president. In the 2022 interview, Haberman described a “circular feeding cycle” between Trump and Fox News, “where they would say something and he would pick it up and amplify it, and then they would cover it more, and that is often how he makes decisions.”
For the “how it plays” president, attention, as well as support, is the vital currency. “Trump is always looking into the eyes of his audience, measuring their interest, aware of when he’s losing it, always trying to redouble it, an endless series of attention-grabbing gambits,” Wolff writes.
It is one thing if that quest for attention informs political campaign plans or even personal legal tactics. (Wolff reports that when Trump was battling indictments, he repeatedly reminded his team that “our legal strategy is our media strategy; our media strategy is our legal strategy.”) It’s quite another when that quest overlaps with foreign policy and military force.
The Times reported that Trump was initially “listing in all directions over whether to choose war, diplomacy or some combination.” But he was impressed with what he described as Israel’s “excellent” and “very successful” military action against Iran, and in conversations with reporters, he intimated that he had a lot to do with it. This is a president who always wants to be in the mix and to be seen as being in the mix. “Trump’s view of the world was almost entirely derived from media flash,” Wolff writes. “If you didn’t exist in the media, you didn’t exist.”
But foreign policy by FOMO is not a sustainable strategy. U.S. military leaders were even worried that Trump’s social-media posts, hinting at the potential use of U.S. force, could undermine the secrecy of U.S. planning. The president was the “biggest threat” to operational security, one official told The Times.
The challenge of “how’s it playing” policymaking is that sometimes it doesn’t play the way you’d like it to. When a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency assessment suggested that the U.S. strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear program by just a few months — in contrast to Trump’s declaration that the facilities had been “totally obliterated” — the administration mobilized in response. The president minimized the report as “very inconclusive” and said that intelligence officials “really don’t know.” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, called it “flat-out wrong,” speculating that it was leaked by a “low-level loser.” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, stated that new intelligence “confirms” the president’s view that the nuclear sites had been destroyed. And John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, said the strikes had “severely damaged” Iran’s program.
So, was the initial intelligence wrong — or was it just not playing well?
In a fiery news conference Thursday morning, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary and former Fox News host, lashed out at the news media for not sufficiently celebrating the “historically successful” U.S. operation, denounced “biased leaks to biased publications,” emphasized the “low confidence” of the initial D.I.A. report and questioned journalists’ motives. “It’s like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump,” he said. (In a sign of his approval, Trump posted the link to Hegseth’s briefing shortly after the secretary finished.)
It is clear where Hegseth got his cues. Earlier in the week, Trump had assailed media outlets — including calling CNN “scum” — for questioning the full impact of the U.S. strike. “You’re gutless losers,” he said. “I say that to CNN because I watch it. I have no choice. I’ve gotta watch that garbage.”
Trump doesn’t have to watch; he likes to watch, even if it means formulating foreign policy based in part on what he sees and hears on the screen. This is not new for him. Back in August of 2015, early in his run for president, Trump went on “Meet the Press,” where Chuck Todd asked him who he relies on for military advice. “Well, I watch the shows,” Trump answered.
And he still does. When the screen is your lens on the world, you gotta see how it’s playing.
The risks of this approach were outlined well by a former infantry officer who became the chief executive of Concerned Veterans for America and who reacted skeptically to Trump’s fixation on television coverage. “You wouldn’t want a top-tier presidential candidate getting all of their military advice from watching ‘Meet the Press.’ There’s a lot more nuance, there’s a lot more detail,” a 35-year-old Pete Hegseth told Fox News in 2015. “At the end of the day, foreign policy and national security is not about TV shows.”
Except now it is. Hegseth, who once warned about overreliance on the screen, has become part of the show. And for the one viewer who matters most, it’s playing just fine.
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Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.” @CarlosNYT
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