U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media at the White House on Wednesday.Brian Snyder/Reuters
In wartime, U.S. presidents usually stay in the background. Not Donald Trump on Iran. One minute he’s saying the war will soon be over; the next, he’s saying it won’t.
He’s posting endlessly on Truth Social, doing press conferences, scrums, taking calls from individual reporters, giving marathon speeches.
He’s the President who never shuts up. He’s turned the Oval Office into a bullhorn. He’s doing more media than any other president, and it makes sense: It means he’s getting his side of the story out more than the others.
Mr. Trump’s foremost skill has always been as a propagandist. With him it’s unrelenting drama, one pungent performance after another. He’s unscripted. You never know who he is going to call a sleazebag. You never know what cockamamie thought will pour from his reeling cranium.
Unlike today’s monument to self-aggrandizement, most other presidents sought to avoid overexposure. Better to be above the fray. And it was thought that the more you said, the more you opened yourself up to criticism.
U.S. military may have bombed Iranian girls’ school using outdated targeting data, sources say
Calvin Coolidge, the president from 1923 to 1929, was a foremost example. Silent Cal, as he was known, rarely met the media, and when he did have something to say it wasn’t terribly profound. Not renowned for his intellectual horsepower, he once opined that “When people are out of work, unemployment results.”
Lyndon Johnson met with the press more often, but was frustrated by the treatment he received. “If one morning I walked on water across the Potomac,” he once groused, “the headline that afternoon would read, ‘President Can’t Swim!’”
The Trump approach has been to take the media head-on. He’s had the guts to do it, and in many respects he’s succeeded. In his first term he repeated his “fake news” charge ad nauseam, so much so that it became part of the lexicon, serving to discredit liberal media and polarize the media landscape.
Term two has seen him become even more proactive. By dominating the airwaves, he reasons that he can manipulate the media more than they can manipulate him.
If there’s a bad headline one day, Mr. Trump will smother it the next by putting out a bigger story to shift the focus. It’s not a new tactic, but he uses it more than any president before him.
Just a couple weeks ago, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was closing on him. He’d just lost a huge Supreme Court case on his emergency tariffs. He was sinking in the polls. It wouldn’t be the least bit surprising if part of his thinking in invading Iran was to push those stories into the background.
Leading during wartime will show us who Trump really is
A hallmark of his time in office has been his war on truth. In the past, when a president told a bald-faced lie, it was a big story. Not so anymore. This President’s dissemination of poppycock and fabrications has become so commonplace it’s no longer considered news; what a victory over the media that is. Journalists produce fact-checking stories, but they have little impact. Mr. Trump pays no heed, holds to his hallucinations, comes back with them the next day. The Washington Post used to run a daily tally of his lies. It has stopped.
Where Mr. Trump has also scored in bringing the media to heel is with his intimidation tactics. Lawsuits, insults and threats have worked. He’s won settlements. He’s installed favourable voices at networks and newspapers, he’s defunding PBS, he’s made journalists more fearful of going after him.
When you consider how he was such a media magnet before he entered politics and how he’s monopolized the news ever since, Donald Trump has to rank as the greatest publicity generator of modern times. While out of office from 2020 to 2024, he was frequently able to dominate the news cycle more than Joe Biden, who was actually the president.
This does take a special skill set. Conflict is what drives the needle, and Mr. Trump knows it. He’s fearless, unpredictable, entertaining, always on the offensive. And he has something else that makes him a unique draw: His outlaw persona, his bad-guy appeal. Many Americans wanted a renegade in power.
For his propaganda purposes, these times provide many advantages. His social media platform Truth Social is a fantastic tool for circumventing the media filter. There’s the sycophantic Fox News, the X platform of his buddy Elon Musk, the kowtowing of Big Tech magnates, the decline of newspapers.
Much has been made about how Mr. Trump has been able to amass great power because of a supine Congress and a conservative Supreme Court. His accumulation of more media power than any president in history is a third extraordinary advantage.