This Politico Report on Trump’s Office Shows Just How Obsessed the Media Still Is With Him

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In “obsessive, inch-by-inch” detail, a Politico report published on Tuesday dissected a photo of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago office and showed that national media outlets aren’t quite ready to wean themselves from their fixation on the 45th president.

The report: Under the headline, “What a photo of Trump’s new office reveals about how he wants to be remembered,” Politico’s Daniel Lipmann exhaustively catalogued a series of objects seen in a picture tweeted out on Monday by former White House aide Stephen Miller.

  • Politico attempted to attach significance to even the most seemingly mundane items in Trump’s office, such as reading glasses, a mug, lamps, the former president’s chair and an “infamous Sharpie.”
  • “Trump also has at least one big black Sharpie — the fat, marker-like pen that he has wielded for years to write and autograph items for friends and allies, and occasionally to mark up critical articles he didn’t like and send it to the offending journalist,” Lipmann wrote in the 1,000-plus-word piece.
  • In the article’s sub-headline, Politico appeared to confess to the monomaniacal nature of the piece, describing the level of detail contained in the breakdown as “obsessive, inch-by-inch.”

Life after Trump: Corporate media outlets who positioned themselves as antagonists to Trump, and saw their ratings skyrocket because of it, are currently experiencing post-45 hangovers.

  • Following a brief post-Election Day spike, CNN has now lost nearly 50% of its primetime audience viewership in the wake of Trump’s Oval Office departure.
  • MSNBC’s slump has been less drastic, but last month several of the network’s programs hit historic ratings lows.
  • Outgoing CNN president Jeff Zucker famously admitted in 2018 that the network’s audience “goes away” when it stops covering Trump.
By We'll Do It Live