MEDIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “’Let’s start with the state of Donald Trump,’ Fox News’s Chris Wallace said at the outset of the president’s latest on-camera interview, on Nov. 17, in the manner of a support-group facilitator pausing for a little check-in before an unpacking of recent events. ‘How dark is your mood?’ It’s easy to forget that this is not, traditionally, how presidential interviews begin. Even in the context of saturation Trump coverage, Wallace’s willingness to lead the interview with the presidential-mood question — put directly to the president himself — was a face-to-face acknowledgment of what we’ve implicitly known for almost two years now: that much of the state of the union now rests on the moment-to-moment state of Trump. Wallace was indirectly referring to a flare-up in coverage about how ill tempered the president had been lately. There had been a heavier-than-usual spate of Breaking Mood stories. He was ‘privately fuming,’ went the evergreen assessment, according to multiple sources familiar with the president’s private fumes. He was alternately ‘bristling,’ ’emboldened’ and ’embittered’; ‘lashing out,’ ‘exploding in rage’ and ‘increasingly isolated.’”
–Mark Leibovich, “On the Trump-Mood Beat — But Why?,” The New York Times online, November 30, 2018