{"id":136946,"date":"2025-05-10T21:40:01","date_gmt":"2025-05-10T21:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/crass-flashy-outrageous-trump-media-blitz-redefines-meaning-of-presidential-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2025-05-10T21:40:01","modified_gmt":"2025-05-10T21:40:01","slug":"crass-flashy-outrageous-trump-media-blitz-redefines-meaning-of-presidential-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/crass-flashy-outrageous-trump-media-blitz-redefines-meaning-of-presidential-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Crass, flashy, outrageous: Trump media blitz redefines meaning of presidential – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

White House communications have adopted a Trumpian air that\u2019s \u2018either completely malevolent or completely brilliant\u2019
T<\/span>here was a disturbance in the Force. Donald Trump celebrated \u201cStar Wars Day\u201d this week with an AI-generated image<\/a> of himself as a muscle-bound warrior holding a red lightsaber in front of two US flags and eagles.
It seemed like a bit of fun but appeared on the White House\u2019s official X account with a dark political message<\/a>: \u201cHappy May the 4th to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting so hard to bring Sith Lords, Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, & well known MS-13 Gang Members, back into our Galaxy. You\u2019re not the Rebellion \u2013 you\u2019re the Empire. May the 4th be with you.\u201d
Star Wars nerds were quick to point out that a red lightsaber implies that Trump has embraced the Dark Side. Actor Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, wrote on social media<\/a>: \u201cProof this guy is full of SITH.\u201d But the joking-not-joking post was also indicative of a wider trend: a revolution in the way the White House communicates with the American public.
Over the past three-and-a-half months, the US president and his team have launched a relentless media offensive<\/a> based on crass language, flashy tactics, shock-value videos and social media memes and posts that are outrageous by design. They have used platforms and personalities to bypass traditional outlets and directly engage the Maga (Make America great again) base. They have found new ways to drown out critics, goad opponents and antagonise the world.
The embrace of viral far-right culture has nurtured a parallel information ecosystem through pro-Trump outlets enjoying a significant growth in influence, access to power and financial investment. It is helping the president dominate the \u201cattention economy\u201d and reshape narratives around the economy, immigration and other policy issues. But it also alarms critics who warn that insults and lies are going unchecked.
Tara Setmayer<\/a>, a political commentator and former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: \u201cDonald Trump has always understood mass communication and the power of propaganda and his rise and success politically will go down in history as one of the most successful propaganda operations ever. He has completely upended any semblance of decency, of class, of gravitas when it comes to presidential communications.
\u201cIt\u2019s literally turning presidential methods of communication into the WWE<\/a> \u2013 the imagery, the immaturity, the outrageousness. All of those things seem to be more important than truth or respect for the office and what it means to use the power of the bully pulpit to speak to the American people and the world.\u201d
Presidential communications have come a long way. Woodrow Wilson held the first presidential press conference in 1913. Franklin Roosevelt pioneered radio with his informal \u201cfireside chats<\/a>\u201d during the Great Depression and the second world war, articulating policies such as the New Deal directly to citizens.
John F Kennedy leveraged TV for live addresses \u2013 for example, during the Cuban missile crisis. Ronald Reagan, a former actor, relished televised addresses, earning the nickname \u201cthe great communicator\u201d. Barack Obama was the first president to use platforms such as YouTube and Twitter extensively, hosting online town halls and bypassing old media.
Over the past decade, Trump has combined the old with the new, holding traditional in-person rallies while also being prolific on Twitter during his first term \u2013 a single all-caps tweet could dominate headlines, move financial markets or upend global diplomacy \u2013 and now his own Truth Social platform.
But only since returning to office has he turned the White House into a quasi-content provider in its own right, continuing the aggressive media strategy honed during his winning election campaign to achieve what his communications director, Steven Cheung, has called<\/a> \u201cfull-spectrum dominance\u201d.
In January, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, posted a photo<\/a> of men in chains boarding a plane and wrote: \u201cDeportation flights have begun.\u201d In February, the White House posted on X a Valentine\u2019s Day card<\/a> with the faces of Trump and \u201cborder czar\u201d Tom Homan with the caption: \u201cRoses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally and we\u2019ll deport you.\u201d
It also posted a video<\/a> of shackled immigrants being loaded on to planes, with the sounds of clanking chains<\/a> and whirring jet engines in the background. The caption said \u201cASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight\u201d. In March, on the day of Trump\u2019s address to a joint session of Congress, the White House\u2019s rapid-response account<\/a> posted more than 200 times to X, promoting clips and favourable reactions.
Trump has spent his career living by the rule that, when he takes a hit, he hits back harder. That philosophy now infuses the White House. When the actor Selena Gomez posted an Instagram video<\/a> in which she cried about the deportation of children, it quickly produced video interviews with the mothers<\/a> of children killed by undocumented immigrants.
When Kilmar \u00c1brego Garc\u00eda<\/a>, a Maryland man with protected legal status, was mistakenly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, Leavitt said \u201coutrage\u201d about the case by Democrats and the media \u201chas been nothing short of despicable\u201d. Dozens of posters of arrested undocumented immigrants were placed along the White House driveway, ensuring they would appear in the live shots of TV journalists.
Some content is downright bizarre. The White House shared a photo of a fake Time magazine cover<\/a> with Trump in a golden crown and the caption, \u201cLONG LIVE THE KING\u201d. Another post contained an AI-generated video that showed the Gaza Strip transformed into a luxurious, gilded resort called \u201cTrump Gaza\u201d. And earlier this month, Trump shared an AI-generated image of himself dressed as the pope as the mourning of Pope Francis<\/a> continued.
Setmayer, who now runs the Seneca Project<\/a> political action committee, commented: \u201cIt\u2019s so outrageous that it would be comical if it weren\u2019t so serious. There\u2019s nothing funny or comical about insulting one of the world\u2019s largest religions and putting yourself in that role. It\u2019s blasphemous. But it\u2019s also a window into how Donald Trump views himself: this is part of that malignant narcissism.
\u201cHe is so desperate for adulation and attention and being all-powerful that he would project himself in a cartoon-like rendering of positions of power using the White House platform to push it. This is something a maladjusted 12-year-old does. Not the most powerful man in the world.\u201d
The Trump White House has a symbiotic relationship with a new wave of podcasters, X users and YouTubers who enjoy access to the briefing room and presidential press pool, often asking Trump conspicuously sycophantic questions<\/a>. Employees of outlets such as the National Pulse and the Daily Wire have been invited on foreign trips with cabinet officials. The exposure is leading to bigger advertising deals and distribution contracts.
No one embodies the new era of White House communications better than Leavitt<\/a>, who at 27 is the youngest-ever press secretary and probably the most zealously on-message. She has shown an uncanny ability to channel Trump\u2019s political psyche, his relish for disparaging the so-called legacy media and his willingness to play fast and loose with facts.
Henry Olsen<\/a>, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: \u201cShe\u2019s approaching it in a very different way than others have done. She is forthrightly being a person who communicates the message of the White House rather than responds to the questions of the press. You can query whether that\u2019s the job she ought to be doing but she is doing it in an outstanding way.
\u201cShe is mature beyond her years. She\u2019s articulate. She both can deliver the message and respond in an interactive way, which is something that some press secretaries have difficulty with. If the job of the press secretary is to send the message of the administration on a regular basis in person, she is knocking the ball out of the park.\u201d
But Mike McCurry<\/a>, who was White House press secretary under Bill Clinton, is among those who query whether that is what the job is about. He said: \u201cShe seems to be in nonstop belligerent mode and showing disdain for the reporters in the room. It\u2019s nothing but a propaganda show. <\/em>She\u2019s not doing the job as it\u2019s traditionally been defined. She\u2019s got a whole different role in the Trump cosmos.\u201d<\/em>
Leavitt presents a weekly \u201cMaga Minute\u201d roundup video on TikTok<\/a>, YouTube and other platforms. Last week also saw the launch of White House Wire<\/a>, a news-style website that publishes exclusively positive coverage. Its format closely resembles the Drudge Report, the rightwing site founded in the 1990s that broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
When he was working for Clinton, McCurry initially tried to dismiss questions about Lewinsky<\/a> by retorting: \u201cAre you really<\/em> going to ask a question based on something in the Drudge Report?\u201d He acknowledges that today\u2019s White House is operating in a very different media environment \u2013 but argues that is no excuse for its lack of accountability.
McCurry said: \u201cThe concept is if you keep throwing stuff up against the wall all the time, the press tries to chase everything down and they get befuddled a little bit because they don\u2019t have a way of focusing back on things that might truly matter in the world.
\u201cIt\u2019s a strategy to try to overwhelm all of the legitimate sources of discourse and just keep changing the tune every day to match whatever it is that you want to try to get done. It\u2019s either completely malevolent or completely brilliant. It\u2019s hard to know which.\u201d<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

White House communications have adopted a Trumpian air that\u2019s \u2018either completely malevolent or completely brilliant\u2019There was a disturbance in the Force. Donald Trump celebrated \u201cStar Wars Day\u201d this week with an AI-generated image of himself as a muscle-bound warrior holding a red lightsaber in front of two US flags and eagles.It seemed like a bit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":136947,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}