President Donald Trump has stored the ticker busy.
“Trump is moving with light speed and brute force to break the existing order and reshape America at home and abroad,” an Related Press reporter wrote on Feb. 22, 2025.
“How do you push back against a tidal wave?” political communication skilled Dannagal Younger wrote of this media phenomenon on Feb. 21. “You can’t.”
I research the connection between communication and democracy. I train college lessons on propaganda, presidential communication and the darkish arts of communication, and I’m the writer of an award-winning 2020 e-book on Trump’s communication methods.
President Donald Trump’s official ‘Truth’ account is seen on a cell phone.
Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto through Getty Pictures
Trump communicates greater than ‘The Great Communicator’
The truth is, Trump is producing much more media content material in his second time period than he did in his first.
Trump’s intensified communication technique
Trump has already had 18 press gaggles or press conferences since taking workplace in January 2025.
Reagan issued 50 government orders in his first yr in workplace in 1981. Trump issued 72 government orders inside his first 30 days in 2025. That’s extra government orders than any earlier president has issued of their first month during the last 40 years, together with himself. He solely issued 33 at this level in his first time period in 2017.
Trump’s media technique in his second time period seems to accentuate the method he utilized in his first time period. Throughout Trump’s first time period, in line with The New York Instances, “Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”
As former Trump aide and present host of the present “War Room” Steve Bannon mentioned in 2018, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk converse to reporters in entrance of a purple Mannequin S Tesla automobile exterior the White Home on March 11, 2025.
Pool Picture/Related Press
A method of management
Media scholar Marshall McLuhan famously argued in 1964 that “The medium is the message.” Likewise, with Trump, the communication technique is the message.
Communication is a device. It may be used to advertise democracy or to erode it. Any politician’s communication technique reveals, a minimum of partially, how they give thought to governing, energy and democracy. Some political leaders talk in ways in which encourage folks to ask questions and use their cause and significant considering expertise to guage public insurance policies.
Different political leaders use communication in undemocratic methods to control and coerce, stopping residents from utilizing their cause and significant considering expertise to guage insurance policies.
As a media and governing technique, I feel that creating an unrelenting tidal wave of content material is designed to allow Trump to draw and maintain the nation’s consideration on himself and – within the course of, drown out different voices.
This methodology overwhelms the media and exhausts many Individuals who can’t simply take in a lot data without delay.
And the tidal wave technique prevents the general public from scrutinizing the president’s actions – as a result of nobody can push again in opposition to a tidal wave.
