Donald Trump can be likened to a toddler who must be bribed so that he doesn't throw a tantrum, or a spoilt and mercurial child who must be appeased with gifts and attention so he puts on a good show and doesn't cause a scene. He is like a real-life (very overgrown) Dudley Dursley or Veruca Salt, if you will. Flattery will get you everywhere with Trump.
And constant flattery is what the US President gets, as according to VICE News, the president is briefed twice a day with a ‘special folder’ that is full entirely of affirmations.
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The folder Trump is apparently presented with is known as the ‘propaganda document’. It is prepared first around 9:30am and again at 4:30pm every day, and has done since the beginning of his administration. According to current and former White House officials, the documents do not contain news, updates on legislation initiatives or any sort of top-secret intelligence, but instead contains screenshots of positive news headlines and news stories applauding Trump, Trump-adoring tweets and even ‘pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful’.
The idea behind the ‘propaganda document’ reportedly came from feedback from the White House communications shop demanding that briefings ‘need to be more f--king positive’.
‘Maybe it’s good for the country that the president is in a good mood in the morning,’ one former RNC official told VICE News, and another current White House official said that the idea was born from Priebus and Spicer - former White House Chief of Staff and former White House Press Secretary respectively - who wanted to be the bearers of good news as a way of ‘self-preservation’.
While it’s not unheard of for the White House to monitor social media and public opinion, David Axelrod, who was the senior adviser to Barack Obama during his first two years in the White House, found the need to shower Trump with positives affirmations hilarious. ‘If we had prepared such a digest for Obama, he would have roared with laughter,’ he said. ‘His was a reality-based presidency.’
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