NBC “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd says one of the things he finds most peculiar about President-elect Trump is that the former reality TV star regularly replays his own TV interviews — with the sound off.
In an interview with Politico published Friday, Todd said Trump is meticulous about his appearance on camera and has a keen awareness of television’s impact on an audience.
“I have interviewed him multiple times,” Todd said. “The amount of times he spends after the interview is over with the sound off — he wants to see what it all looked like. He will watch the whole thing on mute… He’s very, very mindful… He thinks this way, and look, it’s an important insight in just understanding him. The visual stuff is very real beyond just himself.”
It’s a practice Trump may have picked up from former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who is known to be a close associate of the president-elect.
In his 1989 book You Are the Message; Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are, Ailes described how he picks on-camera talent.
“If there was nothing happening on screen in the way the host looked or moved that made me interested enough to stand up and turn the sound up,” he wrote, “then I knew that the host was not a great television performer.” He added, “If nothing moved me toward that sound knob, I would often recommend terminating the contract of that performer.”
