In an erratic performance, President Trump shows his supporters who’s boss

President Donald Trump’s 77-minute White House “impromptu” news conference on Thursday was “reality TV” at its best. He said it hadn’t.

The president understands the mood of the country, but is creating a competing narrative to buy time with the population he values most: Trump voters.

Despite Trump’s claims, CNN President Jeff Zucker said during a state-of-the-company luncheon on Thursday that “there has been no diminution whatsoever in the CNN brand”.

The administration has reportedly banned its officials from appearing on CNN, although there have been sporadic exceptions. People come to you, mostly those who already support your mission or want favors you’re in a position to grant.

If you’re the president, it’s even worse.

Having said that, he has moved to gut U.S. action on climate change and he seems intent on neutering, if not abolishing, the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as repealing Obamacare.

“I’m not a great fan of daily tweets”, McConnell said Friday, referring to the “extra discussion” that Trump likes to engage in. “Saying that we have questions about her credibility does not mean that we would never interview her”, Zucker said.

That was the initial reaction blurted out by Bret Baier at Fox News, as well as by Wolf Blitzer at CNN.

“The good news is he doesn’t have good ratings”, Trump said. Last week, a top official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development was sacked “and led out of the department’s headquarters by security” because officials discovered criticisms the official, Shermichael Singleton, wrote about Trump during the 2016 campaign. The White House may be in chaos; Congress may be struggling to deliver on a promised rewrite of Obamacare; our North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies may be wondering whether they can still count on the U.S.to defend them; the Russians may be so emboldened they’ve parked a spy ship off CT and sent their warplanes to buzz USA destroyers in the Black Sea; but President Trump is heading for a pep rally in Florida this weekend.

Today’s New York Times reports that members of Mar-a-Lago include power players in a range of fields and industries that are of government interest, including “real estate developers, Wall Street financiers, energy executives and others whose businesses could be affected by Mr. Trump’s policies”.

“The overall impression was this was a raucous, combative, sometimes unhinged press conference that recalled moments in the campaign but I think left an terrible lot of people asking what kind of reality is he in here”, said David Gergen, an adviser to four presidents who is now a CNN senior political analyst. Most con men give the impression that they are rolling, but in this administration, when you roll back the fluff, there is no substance and no one knows what they are doing. You’re dishonest people. But I’m not ranting and raving. “The American people are our last line of defense against the media’s hit jobs”, he wrote. “You take a look at some of your shows and you see the bias and the hatred”. I’ll tell you what else I see. Number 1, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life. Mr Trump had asserted earlier in the news conference that his win was the “biggest” since fellow Republican Ronald Reagan, who was elected in 1980 and 1984. Trump bought the property for $5 million in 1985, reports say, a decade after which he turned it into the private club. “I know what’s good and bad”.

“There are people who are going to say that it was unhinged, or their heads are going to explode at something he said, but this is Trump being Trump”, Baier said.