Trump, the Television President, Expands His Cast

The consternation came swiftly: How could the president pick a newsman — a television reporter, no less — for a government role of serious power and influence?

“Outrageous,” groused one European diplomat. Critics accused the White House of being media-obsessed, led by a president more focused on burnishing his image than pursuing policy goals.

Yet the job ultimately went to the television guy: ABC News correspondent John A. Scali, who in 1973 was confirmed as President Richard M. Nixon’s ambassador to the United Nations.

He was not the only small-screen figure courted by Nixon’s circle. “Henry Kissinger asked me to be his undersecretary for whatever the hell the press was called in those days,” Ted Koppel, the onetime “Nightline” host, recalled in an interview. “I must say I was interested.”

Koppel did not accept — “I wasn’t designed to be a diplomat” — but nowadays a similar role is occupied by Heather Nauert, a former “Fox & Friends” co-host, who on Tuesday was named the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs.

Nauert is just one of the as-seen-on-TV faces now starring in President Donald Trump’s White House. And the cast is set to grow.

Television pundit Larry Kudlow, best known for his patter on CNBC, was named Wednesday as Trump’s chief economic adviser. Pete Hegseth, a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” is on the short list to become secretary of veterans affairs. John R. Bolton, the former U.N. ambassador and a frequent Fox News commentator, is under consideration for national security adviser.

The moves are another sign that the dividing line between media and government has been all but erased under Trump, a former reality star who views himself as the casting agent in chief.

Television figures have served as press aides in past administrations, tasked with handling their former colleagues in the media. But the selection of Kudlow crossed a threshold of sorts: the elevation of a television star to a position of real influence over policies affecting millions of Americans.

It was perhaps inevitable that Trump, whose view of the world is indelibly shaped by what he sees on TV, would be a president eager to break the fourth wall.

People close to him have said a major part of his deliberative process is how a decision will play on cable news. Where previous presidents courted news personalities, Trump consults them, seeking policy and strategic advice from Fox News hosts like Jeanine Pirro, who at one point was interviewed for the job of deputy attorney general, and Sean Hannity.

At least three Fox News hosts — Tucker Carlson, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Laura Ingraham — were approached about joining his communications team. Last week, Trump dined at the White House with Jesse Watters, the Fox News co-host of “The Five,” who is best known for ambush interviews and an offensive video mocking Asian-Americans, for which he later apologized.

Now Trump is inviting the commentators to shape the policy they comment on. Hegseth, if hired for the veterans affairs job, would be in charge of reforming a bureaucracy that administers benefits to millions.

Kudlow, a zealous advocate of lowering taxes on the wealthy, will be expected to forge an economic policy that, until this week, he had the luxury of merely judging from the safe harbor of a television studio. In a hall-of-mirrors moment Wednesday, Kudlow went on television to describe how Trump was impressed with how he appeared on television.

“He said, ‘You’re on the air,’ and he said, ‘I’m looking at a picture of you,’ and he said, ‘Very handsome,'” Kudlow said during a chummy interview with his soon-to-be-former CNBC colleagues. He let out a laugh: “So Trumpian!”

Installing the TV crowd in this West Wing could play out in unpredictable ways.

The administration sparked an international incident last year after Sean Spicer, its press secretary at the time, repeated an unsupported accusation about a British spy agency’s wiretapping the Trump campaign. The source? Andrew Napolitano, the TV judge and Fox News legal analyst, who made the claim on “Fox & Friends.”

Napolitano — who also met with Trump to discuss potential Supreme Court picks — had heard the rumor from a conspiracy theorist known for spreading hoaxes. Trump later defended Napolitano, saying, “All we did was quote a very talented legal mind.”

Then came the incident involving Omarosa Manigault Newman, who made a name for herself as the villain of Trump’s “The Apprentice” in 2004 and lasted a year in the administration as director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison.

After she left her position, the reality-show presidency collided with an actual reality show: Newman joined the cast of “Celebrity Big Brother” and impugned the Trump administration as “so bad.”

The White House decided to respond — on live television. “Omarosa was fired three times on ‘The Apprentice,’ and this was the fourth time we let her go,” a deputy press secretary, Raj Shah, said during a White House briefing. (Unsurprisingly, after the back-and-forth, the ratings for “Big Brother” went up.)

The empty-calorie genres of reality shows and cable punditry, which fill the hours with ginned-up conflict, can be a strange fit for the more consequential environment of the White House. The Newman uproar, in particular, seemed to knock some of Washington’s more levelheaded commentators off-kilter.

“It feels like we have reached a level of crazy in this White House, and it is difficult to take it anymore,” Chuck Todd said on MSNBC after Shah’s comments. Kudlow’s arrival in Washington could cause similar agita.

The CNBC host’s smooth demeanor is catnip for the image-focused Trump, who chose Kudlow despite his opposition to tariffs authorized by the White House this month. But Kudlow is more familiar with television lights than the glare that comes with public service; his Washington experience is largely limited to a 1980s stint as a bureaucrat in Ronald Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget.

His predecessors who led the National Economic Council include Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury secretary, and Gary D. Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs.

In 1972, when Nixon nominated Scali for his ambassadorship, he was choosing someone who had spent a year in the White House as an image consultant. Scali had also played a diplomatic role in managing the Cuban missile crisis, acting as a covert liaison between Soviet officials in Washington and the Kennedy administration.

Still, the choice of Scali had its detractors: News of his nomination prompted a New York Times editorial that denounced the “downgrading of the United Nations” and asked why Nixon had picked a newbie “to fill a position once held with distinction by Adlai E. Stevenson.”

Kudlow offers a fresh test case for how a TV personality can make the transition. But he will have to contend with one of Trump’s peculiar traits: The president often prefers the pundits he watches on television to the advisers who work in his West Wing.

“He got hired because the president has seen him on TV,” Alex Conant, a Republican strategist in Washington, said. “To stay hired, he’s going to have to continue to be on TV. A lot.”