Seems obvious to me. He riles against the 'fake media' but constantly feeds them juicy material; in reality he loves the headlines and attention even if it's negative.
Regarding the 'fake lying media' it's a fact that the admin often uses them to leak stories, sometimes fake and sometimes true and in between, and plant propaganda. It's a symbiotic relationship a lot of times.
Trump has real media enemies, but for the most part he runs his press like he did with the New York gossip pages. He doesn't mind the most of the bad things things as long as it gets his message out or amuses him. He's from the "say what you want, just get my name right" school of press relations.
Years ago, 25 or so, he had a big series of dust ups with AJ Benza, a big New York gossip guy. Benza let out some of the
Trump press secrets. Like he'd go over over gossip stories with a red pen, and he'd let stories about dating, etc... go through, but if you called him a millionaire, he'd correct it to billionaire. If a bad story happened, he offer up a worse story about someone else to get the heat off him, etc....
They're hard to find now, but the Benza, Stern, Trump interviews are good glimpse at how it worked. It's a good way to handle print, and older audiences, but doesn't work as well on twitter, where things are fact checked in seconds.
Here's a fun one, Trump and Benza fight over an ex-girlfriend -
https://www.facebook.com/anythingelserobin/videos/hey-now-exclusive-the-infamous-aj-benza-vs-donald-trump-fight-over-a-girl-audio-/467527830615445/ .
You can see he enjoys the fighting, as long as he wins, even if it's an embarrassing slight victory.
