President Trump's photo-op with a bible in front of St. John’s Church Monday evening will be his defining TV moment

The Daily Beast

"There has never been a TV president at the level of Donald Trump," says Kevin Fallon. "Yes, it’s his reality-TV origin story. But it’s also his state of existence: Camera constantly trained on his face, airwaves at his disposal, us as his audience rapt. He is as infatuated with this televised permanence as we seem to be with subsisting on it. But, as came into sharp focus Monday night, that reliance on television as his own political tool has only exposed how ill-equipped he is for the constant scrutiny and the realities of the changing landscape. Since his inauguration, there have been countless critical essays on the role television had in getting him elected, be it a hair tussle on late-night TV or reflexive coverage of every rally, speech, and lie on cable news in the name of big ratings. But there has also been an attempt to understand how the medium has captured and will memorialize Trump and this time. How has scripted television changed to spotlight the state of the country and the impact of the administration on its culture? What value has cable news brought, with its wall-to-wall coverage of Trump and the explosion of punditry? When we look back at this era, what will we be able to cue up as its defining moment, as we watched it unfold on television? And what will it say about him? Now we have the answer."