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His staff had a name for when Trump utterly ignored their collective advice: defiance disorder.
Media Madness
Howard Kurtz
After flirting with the idea for decades, Trump was ready to take the plunge on June 16, 2015. Unlike most of my colleagues in the media, I knew instinctively when Trump came down that golden escalator to declare his candidacy that he would be a formidable candidate. Every time Trump said or did something stupid, they would declare him to be toast, only to find him climbing higher. And the same cycle repeated itself during the general election. They were misreading both the man and the mood of the country. There was no middle ground. I was called a Trump sycophant when I argued that the billionaire shouldn’t be counted out, and when I criticized him on some issue, his loyalists would savage me as a Trump hater. Both were way off the mark. I don’t like either party. I believe even the best politicians can be self-serving hypocrites. My brand has always been fairness. I’ve been a reporter and columnist for the Washington Post and Newsweek. I’ve been an anchor at both CNN and Fox. I’ve got plenty of opinions but I don’t take political sides. And I’ve always tried not to be trapped in the airless bubble of establishment media types. My father sold shirts for a living. I grew up in a city-subsidized apartment building next to a sewage treatment plant in the non-trendy part of southern Brooklyn. I went to the state university in Buffalo, which is practically Ohio, though I did get a master’s at Columbia. My first job was working the night shift at a newspaper in Hackensack for $10,000 a year. So I may have been quicker than most of my colleagues to grasp that the country was fed up with the empty promises and utter dysfunction of Washington. I was sensitive to the fact that many Americans we blithely categorize as working class had lousy jobs, were bouncing between jobs, or worried about losing their jobs, and were brimming with resentment. I didn’t dismiss them as racist yahoos. This novice candidate, I thought, is connecting on a visceral level.
Media Madness
Howard Kurtz
How Lincoln responded to attacks directed against him and his party reveals much about his temperament and the character of his developing leadership. Such was the lure of politics in the antebellum era that discussions and debates between Whigs and Democrats regularly attracted the fanatic attention of hundreds of people. Opponents attacked each other in fiery, abusive language, much to the delight of raucous audiences, inciting an atmosphere that could burst into fistfights, even, on occasion, guns being drawn. While Lincoln was as thin-skinned and prickly as most politicians, his retorts were generally full of such good-humored raillery that members of both parties could not help but laugh and relax in the pleasure of his entertaining and well-told stories.
Leadership in Turbulent Times
Doris Kearns Goodwin
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