OPINION: THE BOY WHO CRIED FAKE NEWS FROM INSIDE THE MAGA GATES — TRUMP CAN’T SEE HOW THE WORLD HAS CHANGED.

If there’s anything we’ve learned in the five years since Donald Trump came down that escalator, it’s that he cannot thrive without a constant stream of attention, adulation and affirmation. It’s why he’s obsessed with cable news and Fox in particular; why his cabinet meetings begin with almost worshipful praise from each of his appointees; and why he’s constantly touting his sky-high support from other Republicans.

It’s also why, on Saturday, he held an indoor rally in the midst of a respiratory disease pandemic. “I guarantee you after Saturday, if everything goes well, he’s going to be in a much better mood,” an unnamed Trump political adviser told CNN the day before the event. “He believes that he needs to be out there fighting, and he feeds off the energy of the crowds.”

The president is plainly unable to handle bad news, or even the idea that he isn’t popular or well-liked. Someone who rejects the idea of being rejected may, for example, believe that voter fraud is the only threat to his re-election. And he’s constructed a bubble, let’s call it a safe space, in which he’s insulated from bad news, negative feedback and pretty much any kind of criticism. The result is that he’s unable to respond to a changing national mood, unable to adjust to a public that wants more leadership than spectacle.

We have plenty of evidence that Trump shields himself from anything that could disrupt the illusion of popularity and success he’s constructed around himself. At the Tulsa rally, he told his audience that, when faced with evidence of rising coronavirus infection rates, he urged his team to reduce the rate of testing. “When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please,’” he said. His press secretary says this was a “comment that he made in jest,” but Trump has expressed similar sentiments in the past. “If we did very little testing, we wouldn’t have the most cases,” he said in May during a meeting with Kim Reynolds, the governor of Iowa. “So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”

Likewise, on the question of his campaign, the president’s re-election staffers know just what he wants to hear. They’ve either downplayed his poor numbers — telling him that the polls showing Joe Biden ahead skew Democratic — or challenged them outright. After a CNN poll found him trailing Biden by 14 points, the Trump campaign sent a cease-and-desist letter to Jeff Zucker, the president of the network, demanding that he retract the poll and apologize for its release. The poll, read the letter, is a “stunt” meant to “cause voter suppression, stifle momentum and enthusiasm for the president, and present a false view generally of the actual support across America for the president.”

What do you think? 

Read more here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/maga-trump-fake-news.html