President Trump’s early presidency has brought unprecedented transparency to the White House. More than any other president, he wants the American people to see what he is doing in real-time.
That is why the press has been allowed to witness him signing executive orders, meeting with his Cabinet, and having an intense disagreement with a foreign leader. This accessibility is one vehicle with which President Trump is forging his own distinctive relationship with the American public.
The president is comfortable going directly to the people and positioning himself as their true spokesperson. It is remarkable how much he is willing to put on display.
On Friday, during a press availability at the start of a scheduled meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy , President Trump allowed the cameras to roll and the press to see what was a startlingly acrimonious meeting in the Oval Office. As the New York Times reported, “No president in memory has ever erupted at a visiting foreign leader in such a vituperous way on camera, not even enemies of the United States, much less a putative ally.”
But creating such a shock may have been the point. That quality compels attention.
As the meeting became more and more heated, Vice President JD Vance, who was also in attendance, accused the Ukrainian president of being ungrateful for American assistance and criticized him for litigating his version of events in front of the American media. The president had a different view.
He turned to Vance and said, “I think it is good for the American people to see what is going on. I think it is very important. That’s why I kept this going so long.”
That line, “It is good for the American people to see what is going on,” captures the essence of President Trump’s embrace of a hyper-public presidency.
That doesn’t mean that the administration won’t do anything in secret. It does mean that the president will be in almost constant communication with the public. Thus, in addition to his use of social media, during his first term, he averaged more exchanges with the press per year than any president in modern American history.
Even though he now wants to determine which members of the press will have access to the White House and other venues, President Trump craves constant press attention. The New York Post reports that “Trump has answered more than 1,000 press questions in the first month of his second term— 7 times more than Biden in the same period.”
On February 24, The National Journal’s George Condon observed that Trump started answering questions “inside the U.S. Capitol, less than an hour after taking his oath of office, when he was asked if he had any reaction ‘to the pardons President Biden did at the last minute.’ The last question—No. 1,009—(as of that date) came more than 3,000 feet above North Carolina at 9:14 p.m. … as he returned to Washington after five days in Florida.”
Condon quotes David Greenberg, professor of history, journalism, and media studies at Rutgers University, “’the president’s accessibility “clearly shows a comfort level with being his own spokesman. … He enjoys it. He thinks of himself as a persuasive personality or he enjoys the attention—or both. And he may not be wrong. He has demonstrated that he can command a following for the way he puts his ideas.’”
Scolding Zelenskyy and giving him a public dressing-down fits that profile. It projected a version of the strength that Trump thinks pleases the American public.
So what might have been just another l meeting about Ukraine instantly grabbed international headlines. Everyone is now talking about what Trump said to Zelenskyy.
Some of that talk is favorable, but much of it is unfavorable. What matters in the hyper-public presidency is that the focus is on Trump.Politico got it right in 2016: “(T)he idea, unprecedented at this level of politics, is at the heart of one of the most remarkable mechanisms of Trump’s rise—the conviction that mistakes, flagrant provocations, and the attendant bad publicity genuinely don’t matter, so long as they serve the goal of owning the spotlight.”
“On the short list of Trump’s most guiding, abiding beliefs,” it continued, “this is one that ranks near the top: that bad publicity doesn’t have to be avoided, and doesn’t have to be endured—that it should be embraced, and even stoked.”
What happened on Friday with Zelenskyy is just the latest example.
Since he came on the national stage, the president has shown unusual political bravado, letting the public see him, warts and all, swearing, mocking people, delighting in exacting retribution from his enemies, and violating the conventions of polite society. Some write this off, attributing it to his personality and what they see as a pathological need to stay in the limelight.
But that is a mistake. Trump’s willingness to be seen is more than that; it is deeply political.
The fact that the president does not hide from the press reveals a conception of political power in which a political leader needs to be seen to create an unusual and powerful connection with the public they serve.
Trump’s actions are part of an effort to change American democracy into what political scientists call “plebiscitary democracy.” They use this term “to describe those systems wherein a leader is elected but once elected has almost all of the power.”
Plebiscitary politics is “politics without intermediaries.” Its appeal is its immediacy. So is its danger. Plebiscitary politics is often a tool of the autocrat.
President Trump understands plebiscitary politics as well as anyone. He knows that “the current political culture now demands the president to be a popular leader, with ‘a duty constantly to defend themselves publicly, to promote policy initiatives nationwide, and to inspirit the population.’”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes dubs President Trump the master of the “attention economy.” As Hayes puts it, “He is the political figure who most fully exploited the new rules of the attention age. He seemed to sense intuitively – born of a combination of his experience with the New York City tabloids and his own psychological needs – that attention is all that matters.” Hayes explains that “Trump’s approach to politics ever since the summer of 2015, when he entered the presidential race, is the equivalent of running naked through the neighborhood: repellent but transfixing.”
The Washington Post captured this approach when it called Friday’s exchange between the leaders of two countries “a striking breach of Oval Office comity, where even tough exchanges have typically happened with calm voices and diplomatic language…which shocked global leaders.”
But creating such a shock may have been the point. That quality compels attention.
The Oval Office dustup was a well-prepared trap for the Ukrainian President. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham suggested as much when he “told reporters after the heated meeting that he had warned Zelenskyy to proceed carefully…. ‘I talked to Zelenskyy this morning…. Don’t take the bait.’”
The trap was set and sprung for all the world to see. Zelenskyy took the bait and created another transfixing moment for Donald Trump’s hyper-public presidency.
As the meeting drew to a close, the president made that clear when he crowed: “This is going to be great television.”
Read more
about Ukraine’s struggles with the Trump administration
