Like many different information organizations, The Related Press maintains a “live updates” web page, which posts the most recent from the Trump administration in a ticker tape-like dwell scroll, with a number of updates per hour, 12 hours a day.
President Donald Trump has stored the ticker busy.
“Trump is shifting with gentle velocity and brute pressure to interrupt the prevailing order and reshape America at dwelling and overseas,” an Associated Press reporter wrote on Feb. 22, 2025.
Many Americans find the amount and pace of news exhausting, complicated and overwhelming.
“How do you push again in opposition to a tidal wave?” political communication skilled Dannagal Younger wrote of this media phenomenon on Feb. 21. “You’ll be able to’t.”
I study the relationship between communication and democracy. I educate university classes on propaganda, presidential communication and the darkish arts of communication, and I’m the writer of an award-winning 2020 book on Trump’s communication methods.
Intentionally overwhelming folks with a flood of stories content material is a propaganda strategy utilized by authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin to distort reality and stop folks from clearly evaluating their authorities’s actions.
Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Trump communicates greater than ‘The Nice Communicator’
When Ronald Reagan’s first time period as president started in 1981, a number of distinguished political scientists noted in an analysis {that a} “week scarcely goes by with out at the least one main information story dedicated to protection of a radio or TV speech, an deal with to Congress, a speech to a conference, a press convention, a information launch, or another presidential utterance.”
It’s onerous to consider that Reagan’s presidential communication solely attracted one main information story per week, particularly since he’s usually referred to as “the Great Communicator.”
The Eighties had a slower, pre-digital information surroundings than that of the present day, to make certain. However Trump can also be merely producing much more information content material than Reagan did.
At the moment, Trump’s frequent press conferences, information releases, social media posts and different appearances and offhand remarks generate a continuing circulate of latest tales and social media posts every day. The proliferation of cellphones and social media permits many individuals to comply with the information all through the day. Folks, in return, anticipate the president and different politicians to speak to the general public consistently and often berate them once they fail to satisfy that expectation and go silent.
In actual fact, Trump is producing much more media content material in his second time period than he did in his first.
Trump’s intensified communication technique
Reagan averaged about 5.8 information conferences per 12 months. Trump averaged 22 per 12 months in his first time period, in keeping with data collected by a nonpartisan group on the College of California Santa Barbara referred to as the American Presidency Mission. Former President Joe Biden averaged 9.25 per 12 months.
Trump has already had 18 press gaggles or press conferences since taking office in January 2025.
A news analysis performed by Nationwide Journal White Home reporter George Condon confirmed that Trump has already answered greater than 1,000 questions from reporters since he returned to workplace, which is almost 5 occasions extra questions than he answered at this level in his first presidency.
Trump has additionally made plenty of information by issuing almost 90 executive orders, which he has used each as a technique for exercising executive power over points like international help and as a technique for attracting media coverage.
Reagan issued 50 govt orders in his first 12 months in workplace in 1981. Trump issued 72 govt orders inside his first 30 days in 2025. That’s extra govt orders than any previous president has issued of their first month over the past 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 term, according to The New York Instances, “Mr. Trump instructed high aides to consider every presidential day as an episode in a tv present wherein he vanquishes rivals.”
As former Trump aide and present host of the present “War Room” Steve Bannon said in 2018, “The actual opposition is the media. And the best way to take care of them is to flood the zone with shit.”
In 2025, as a way to win the day’s information protection, Trump is flooding the media with an unrelenting tidal wave of stories content material to dominate and vanquish the zone.
This technique is obvious within the Oval Workplace govt order signing occasions. Trump actually makes information by signing a big piece of paper in entrance of cameras and reporters. These occasions are carefully staged political theater for media consumption wherein Trump casts himself because the nation’s hero defending it from foreign invasions, diversity programs or paper straws.
Lots of Trump’s govt orders are dealing with legal challenges, and a few have been shot down by federal judges. Nonetheless, it’s the spectacle of signing the orders that I, as a communications scholar, consider is designed to win the day – they’re efficient at producing information protection and making Trump look highly effective.
“Trump, as we all know from this primary month, is essentially the most news-making particular person to occupy the Oval Workplace I’ve ever seen,” stated New York Instances Govt Editor Joe Kahn on Feb. 27.
Pool Image/Associated 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 instrument. It may be used to advertise democracy or to erode it. Any politician’s communication technique reveals, at the least partially, how they consider governing, energy and democracy. Some political leaders talk in ways in which encourage people to ask questions and use their motive and significant pondering abilities to guage public insurance policies.
Different political leaders use communication in undemocratic methods to control and coerce, stopping residents from utilizing their motive and significant pondering abilities to guage insurance policies.
What does Trump’s tidal wave of stories content material say about how he thinks about governing, energy and democracy?
As a media and governing technique, I believe that creating an unrelenting tidal wave of content material is designed to allow Trump to draw and preserve the nation’s consideration on himself and – within the course of, drown out different voices.
This technique overwhelms the media and exhausts many Americans who can not simply take in a lot data directly.
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.
