‘Defiance disorder’: Trump’s unshakeable compulsion to create scandal

A NEW book reveals that even Donald Trump’s closest advisers are powerless to save him from his most self-destructive tendencies.

UNITED States president Donald Trump had been in office for less than 24 hours when he decided to do something outrageous.

Feeling that the media was trying to discredit his election by reporting that the crowd for his inauguration was smaller than Barack Obama’s, Mr Trump decided to start his presidency on a war footing.

He ordered his spokesman Sean Spicer to call an extraordinary press conference the day after his inauguration with the express purpose of dressing down the media.

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe,” Mr Spicer bellowed. (BTW: It was far from the largest audience ever.)

Before the press conference, most members of the fledgling President’s staff advised him against berating the media over the size of the crowd. White House adviser Kellyanne Conway told him: “You’re really big. That’s really small.”

Donald Trump is compelled to pick fights, even if it goes against the best advice. Picture: Mandel Ngan / AF

But, Mr Trump was spoiling for a fight — so he ignored his advisers and did it anyway.

Mr Spicer would later regret the notorious press conference, admitting he “screwed up”. And even Mr Trump — a man notorious for not owning up to his mistakes — made this rare admission as the debate over the crowd size dominated headlines for days.

“You were right,” he would later tell his senior staff. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

The episode is the perfect example of Donald Trump’s “defiance disorder”, a condition journalist Howard Kurtz explores in his scathing new book Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press and the War Over the Truth.

Donald Trump would send out his spokesman, former press secretary Sean Spicer, to settle scores. Picture: Nicholas Kamm / AFP

Kurtz writes that the President’s staff came up with the term to describe when he “utterly ignored their collective advice”.

“It’s remarkable the degree to which Trump’s closest advisers have sometimes vehemently tried to stop him from doing certain things only to watch him defy them to do it anyway,” Kurtz told news.com.au in his first Australian interview to promote the book.

He said there were countless times during Mr Trump’s first year where “things would be going well”, and then the President would make a blunt remark or an outrageous tweet that derailed the whole operation.

One memorable example Kurtz cites is when the President tweeted — without a shred of evidence — that Mr Obama was a “bad (or sick) guy” for tapping his phones.

“While the advisers are accustomed to being blindsided, there’s no way to stop the President from speaking his mind,” Kurtz said.

“Donald Trump isn’t fully happy unless he’s fighting with someone and the picking fights is often politically advantageous for him.

“When he picks the wrong fight, or doesn’t have the facts to back up his Twitter attacks, it creates a hole his aides have to dig out of.

“All this is red meat to the press.”

The President thrives on controversy. Picture: Punit Paranjpe / AFP

While the book is unflattering to the President and his staff, Kurtz reserves his fiercest criticism for the media itself. At its core, Media Madness is a withering assessment of a press corps he sees as going too far in its anti-Trump reporting.

“I believe in aggressive coverage of every president, but none of us have seen the relentless waves of negative coverage as is the case with President Trump,” Kurtz told news.com.au.

“There is something about it that is personal, that is almost visceral and I think it’s hurting the credibility of the business that I love.

“At the same time, the President creates some of his own problems both with the constant over-the-top attacks of the mainstream media and by fanning the flames of controversies that should be over in a day.

“Every time the President says something that’s embellished, exaggerated or untruthful, he gives ammunition to a news business that is already generally disdainful of him.”

Many media outlets — news.com.au included — devote coverage to correcting Mr Trump’s misstatements, but Kurtz says Mr Trump’s “guy-in-the-bar style” means his words will never live up to that scrutiny.

“The media were accustomed to covering presidents whose language was carefully calibrated, whose every utterance was vetted by the bureaucracy,” Kurtz writes.

“Trump’s endless talk-a-thon, his habit of making policy on the fly, made for good copy but it also left Washington reporters appalled, as they held him to a standard he had no intention of observing.”

Donald Trump knows how to work the media, but since he was elected it has been eating him alive. Picture: Jim Watson / AFP

Kurtz told news.com.au that the media’s obsession with correcting Mr Trump’s exaggerations actually did damage to their reputation in the eyes of voters.

“I’m not a kneejerk media basher. I wrote this book out of heartfelt concern that many members of the press don’t understand the extent of the damage they’re doing,” he said.

“For all the media critics of Donald Trump, his core supporters love his finger-in-the-eye style.

“A lot of the ‘truth squadding’ is dismissed by his supporters as nitpicking.

“Perhaps [the media] would have more credibility if it didn’t seem like every news outlet is picking him apart.

“It convinces Trump supporters that they will never give the guy an even break.”

With the proprietor of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas. You'll see that interview & my Ted Cruz sitdown on #Mediabuzz pic.twitter.com/LbyiBHrfO1

— HowardKurtz (@HowardKurtz) January 23, 2016

Kurtz describes a vicious circle in the US where the media attacks the President, he bites back savagely and the cycle continues.

“The news outlets that have invested in negative stories are being rewarded at the box office with increased clicks and ratings,” Kurtz said.

“The press makes a very convenient foil for a president who takes negative coverage very personally and the President makes a big, fat piñata for media operations that basically view him as unfit for office.

“For all of the venom that he’s spewed at the press, he actually craves the approval of the press, including the ‘failing’ New York Times, to which he keeps granting interviews.

“I think the reality show that we now see between a frustrated president and a sometimes hostile media establishment is going to remain the script for the rest of his term, even as Trump privately meets with journalists he denounces and provides more access than Barack Obama did.”

Howard Kurtz was formerly a media critic at The Washington Post.

Kurtz, who wrote for The Washington Post for 29 years, has interviewed Mr Trump multiple times and is on a first-name basis with him.

Having watched the real estate tycoon’s master manipulation of the New York tabloid market during the 1980s and ’90s, Kurtz was one of the few pundits who refused to write-off the idea of Donald Trump as president before the election.

“President Trump is the same person he was when I met him in 1981: bombastic, bursting with confidence and possessing a bull-headed desire to do things his way,” Kurtz said.

“His absolute conviction that all the pundits were wrong, that he could win, turned out to be right.

“But it’s a lot harder to govern with no political experience and a staff that is immersed in self-destructive leaks and with a press corps that includes many members who are privately disdainful of him.”

And with three years still to go before Mr Trump faces the American electorate again, Kurtz believes this “toxic relationship” between an outrageous president and an outraged press will remain.

Media Madness is out this month in Australia through NewSouth Books.