Trump is everywhere again

Joe Biden promised Americans a four-year break from thinking about the presidency every day. That hiatus ended at 12:01 p.m. Monday, when Donald J. Trump took the oath of office.

It was almost like he’d never left.

The former reality TV star followed his inaugural address in the Capitol rotunda with an off-the-cuff speech to his supporters, a 47-minute gaggle with reporters in the Oval Office and remarks at three formal galas. By week’s end, he had tweeted multiple policy announcements, weaved his way through a two-part prime-time interview with Sean Hannity and made speeches at recovery and disaster zones in Asheville, North Carolina, and Los Angeles.

Yes, Trump was eager to sign all those executive orders reversing Biden’s policies. But the bigger flex for Trump, 78, was to contrast his accessibility, aptitude and activity with his predecessor, who was so often shielded from public view by aides wary of showcasing the 82-year-old’s growing limitations.

As fast as the movers changed out the White House furniture, the country went from an invisible president, unable to command the spotlight, to an omnipresent one who wants the public’s attention at all times.

“Did Biden ever do this?” Trump asked reporters on his first day in office, casually talking as he signed a slew of executive orders Monday evening, just after returning to the Oval Office.

Although Biden did take questions from reporters here and there, his more informal exchanges with the press were sporadic and rarely lasted more than a few minutes. More often than not, he was out of view.

Trump stormed back into the Oval Office and, with cameras rolling, immediately began rolling back Biden’s agenda — and advancing his own.

As he casually Sharpied his signature onto pieces of parchment — pardoning 1,500 people who stormed the Capitol four years ago, eradicating race- and gender-based hiring preferences across the federal government, renaming geographic landmarks, halting all refugee admission programs, rescinding Biden administration initiatives to tackle climate change and protect Medicaid and creating the Department of Government Efficiency — nearly two dozen members of the press stood around the room, feeding him questions.

The group of journalists in the Oval was almost twice the size of the traditional 13-member White House press pool, a reflection of the press corps’ sudden avidity for Trump after four years of begging for access to the more cloistered Biden.

“It was a bit of a free-for-all,” one reporter in the room said afterward. “Exactly what the first term was like.”

On Friday, Trump spoke with reporters on the South Lawn before lifting off in Marine One, gaggled again with reporters on Air Force One en route to North Carolina, where he held two public events that saw him take additional questions — many of which had already been asked in all the previous encounters. After touring burn zones around Los Angeles on Friday, he was scheduled to fly to Las Vegas, where he was to deliver additional remarks on Saturday.

Karoline Leavitt, the newly minted White House press secretary, has yet to hold a briefing, due largely to her boss’ command of the media spotlight. Trump’s early pace, she suggested, wasn’t about to ease. “I hope the press is ready to work their asses off after their four-year vacation covering the previous administration,” she said.

Within the press corps, there is some ambivalence about Trump’s firehose on blast. The excitement about being able to ask the president about why he pardoned people convicted of vandalism, trespassing and violently attacking police officers, not to mention questions about everything from tariffs to TikTok, is tempered by the awareness that it is all, once again, too much. Too much to process and capture in real-time. Too much for the country to digest.

Unlike Trump’s first two chiefs of staff, Reince Priebus and John Kelly, who fruitlessly sought to limit his social media posts and keep him focused and hidden away, Susie Wiles is not that kind of gatekeeper. Instead of managing him, she manages the chaos around him. It’s what some aides call her “superpower” and what may give her the longevity her predecessors lacked. The same can be said for the larger crew of White House aides, most of whom have come of age in the MAGA movement and have no ties to the old GOP establishment.

But “it’s a double-edged sword for White House staff,” says a veteran of the first Trump White House who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “When he answers every question, he runs the risk of taking away from his own message.”

The person pointed to one of Trump’s press encounters this week, intended to showcase $500 billion in private spending on artificial intelligence.

“But the reporters wanted to talk about [Jan. 6],” said the person. “And if you turned on most of the legacy media channels, that’s probably most of what they have been talking about.”

The press no longer chases every tennis ball Trump throws out on social media, although fresh quotes and clips still present a variety of irresistible nuggets that go viral online. On Wednesday, he used Truth Social to blast the bishop who urged him during Tuesday’s inaugural prayer service to show mercy to the vulnerable and, in another post, to threaten Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a diplomatic end to the war in Ukraine or face new “Taxes, Tariffs and Sanctions.”

Trump’s instinctive approach to communicating, while often challenging to fact-checkers and politically perilous in the short-term, has served him well on the whole. His restoration as president after two impeachments, the trauma of Jan. 6 and a felony conviction leaves little doubt about his unique and enduring appeal.

“They are better at this than they were in 2016,” said Kevin Madden, a long-time Republican communications consultant and strategist in Washington. “And they are using the contrast between them and the Biden administration to their advantage.”

Biden, who could never convince the country the economy was strong and didn’t benefit politically from a slew of legislative accomplishments, failed to leverage the bully pulpit. But his chronically low approval ratings and Trump’s 2024 electoral rout underlined the limitations of that approach.

Trump and his team, by contrast, are “moving with a certain level of volume and intensity that they believe will help them overwhelm their critics and reinforce the momentum they have with their allies,” Madden added. And he noted any dependency on the legacy media is fast decreasing. “They have an ability now with all of the other platforms — Megyn Kelly’s show, Joe Rogan’s podcast, Steve Bannon’s show — to directly communicate with their key stakeholders and audiences they can mobilize to help enact their agenda.”

The flurry of activity in Trump’s first week back in the White House offers dozens of actions for his supporters to cheer — and too much for the media and public to absorb. Cable networks have chosen to focus coverage on the Jan. 6 pardons and have spent comparably little time highlighting orders to do away with Biden-era environmental protections or the halting of refugee admissions and impact, including on thousands of Afghans who were scheduled to be flown to the U.S. in the next few months.

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University and press critic who gained some prominence online during Trump’s first term, said that traditional media institutions are losing ground in a fast-changing, atomized and increasingly partisan information environment.

“I don’t believe there is a broad national audience anymore,” Rosen said. “I think we’re in a golden age for propaganda organized around Steve Bannon’s maxim: Flood the zone with shit.”