No.
No. He used to have popular and well connected managers working for him, but they don't anymore, and at least some of them were technically working for Putin.
No, the American press is incompetent at following a story.
He has no agency either way.
Donald Trump is a loser idiot who tweets about everything and is ruled by whim and passion. The fact that people have latched on to his daily bull**** is a failure of the people, not a success of Donald Trump.
His many former business partners would disagree.
The only way Donald Trump uses American "news" is as a source of policy.
The DNC and Clinton campaign conspired with the news corporations to promote Donald Trump as a legitimate Republican candidate, to embarrass them. Clinton - someone who actually knows how the media works, and uses it - is the one who exploited the news for Donald Trump's benefit, not Donald Trump. Ref: Podesta emails.
We have discussed how and why Donald Trump is an idiot, rather than a Machiavellian business super genius. We also discussed how Donald Trump looks to different people. The short version is that Donald Trump has the manners and bearing of a lottery winner, which, to be as classist as possible, is mainly convincing to the kinds of people who mainly play the lottery.
Unlike Donald Trump, Pence actually has experience running a large organization. Also by all accounts he plays ball and would be a fairly conventional president.
Unlike, for example, Trump, who clearly thinks angry twitter is a cunning negotiating tactic to convince the other side that he is insane. Like Rex Tillerson is a used car salesman or something, and his boss is in a really bad mood but he's totally gonna go talk him into giving North Korea a great deal but it turns out to be a free undercoat and North Korea had better take it because the boss is gonna call the whole thing off any second!
Except this isn't how the political world works, international diplomacy isn't low stakes business trash talk between billionaires trading fortunes that neither of them would ever miss. It is a nuclear armed dictator being threatened with death and loss of face by the most powerful country on earth. The only reason the Cuban Missile Crisis turned out is because the Soviets were much more intelligent and reasonable than JFK was, and I really doubt you can hope for the same thing from a goddamn Kim.