Donald Trump’s Dream Palace of Puffery

Donald Trump’s Dream Palace of Puffery
The Pentagon’s ban on real journalism looks to be a preview of where the White House is headed.
Susan B  Glasser The New  Yorker October 16th 2025

Trump, it appears, is building a dream palace of endless puffery for himself, a gilded safe space where there will be no more tough questions, no more pesky reporters or impertinent demands for information that he does not want to give. And imagine how very powerful the President, who already believes the Constitution gives him the power “to do whatever I want,” will feel then. The Pentagon’s move to effectively ban journalism from its halls this week was not an outlier—it was a preview.

You might think that the Kremlinization of the White House press pool doesn’t really matter at a moment when there are so many other Trump-generated crises in the country. Or that it is simply self-serving of journalists to complain about their own perks being taken away. Or that the President has no obligation, legal or otherwise, to answer questions from anyone. All of which are fair points.

But the reason to pay attention to what’s happening with the coverage of the Presidency is that Trump cares about it perhaps more than anything else. There has never been a more media-obsessed President, nor one for whom the regard of others, even if it is suck-uppery in the crudest form, matters so much. He is known to spend hours a day consuming cable-news reports about himself. 

There is no detail of his public portrayal that does not concern him. In a lengthy social-media post this week, he berated Time for a cover about his Middle East diplomacy which was so complimentary it was headlined “His Triumph.” Trump’s beef was with the accompanying photo of himself, which he deemed “the Worst of All Time.” The point being: there is no pleasing a leader whose need for affirmation is so bottomless.

The template for Trump’s second term so far has been to remake the White House as a place increasingly devoid of constraints or criticism. Gone are the first-term advisers such as John Kelly or Jim Mattis who saw themselves as checks on Trump’s tendency to go rogue. Only yes-men and flatterers need apply, and more and more they seem to be competing with one another to come up with the most over-the-top compliments possible for the boss. Last weekend, during a rally in Tel Aviv to celebrate the Trump-brokered deal to release the Israeli hostages, Trump’s Middle East negotiator, Steve Witkoff, proclaimed him “the greatest President in American history.” It doesn’t take much imagination to think what talk like that from his advisers does to a man with Trump’s ego. Those questions from reporters may soon be the last thing left tethering the President to at least some form of reality.

["Democracy Dies In Darkness", The absence of a press pool helps']

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