Since his inauguration, US president Donald Trump has relentlessly pursued the public’s attention each day of his second term in office.
In doing so, Trump has set out to dominate our collective consciousness unlike any of his predecessors.
To understand how he has achieved this omnipresence, an analysis of the first 329 days of his second term shows at least one instance each day when he attracted the public’s attention to himself and his actions.
The review, carried out by the New York Times, encompassed more than 250 media appearances, more than 320 official appearances and more than 5,000 Truth Social posts or reposts. The analysis shows that while Trump has lagged behind his predecessors in his number of official appearances, he has pursued a raft of methods to force himself into the public consciousness on a daily, sometimes even hourly, basis.
The battery of activity started from the moment he was inaugurated, when he travelled from the Capitol to Capital One Arena – both in Washington – to publicly sign a flurry of executive orders.
Since then, he has stayed in the public eye in part by doing things no president has ever done. High-stakes Oval Office meetings, like his negotiations with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, are held on-camera and broadcast live on global news networks. His Q&A sessions with reporters frequently last an hour or more.
He regularly airs his opinions – on social media, in discursive asides at rallies – about idiosyncratic subjects that range widely across the zeitgeist, from Sydney Sweeney’s denim ads to the redesigned logo of the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain to the mysterious fate of aviator Amelia Earhart, who vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
His engagement with the news media has soared well beyond the start of his first administration.
Up to and including December 14th, Trump took reporters’ questions on 449 occasions, compared with 223 during the same period of his first term. On average, he has interacted with journalists roughly twice a day, doubling his rate from 2017, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University political scientist who tracks presidential press interactions. Trump limits which news outlets can ask questions at small events, but in sheer volume, he is the most media-accessible modern president and far outpaces his predecessor, Joe Biden.
“Reporters will be in my office asking me for the president’s reaction to a breaking news story,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in an interview. “And I’ll just say to them, ‘I don’t know, why don’t you ask him yourself in 30 minutes?’.”
Many of his public moments go viral online, like his diatribe about restoring the name of the NFL’s Washington Redskins, or the AI-generated video meme he posted of himself dribbling a football with Cristiano Ronaldo in the Oval Office. They take on a life of their own, rippling across social media and dissected and amplified by influencers and mass media platforms alike.
The result is a president whose not-so-inner monologue is injected into our daily lives in myriad ways, when we are watching TV on the weekends or idly scrolling the web – a Greek chorus for a national narrative.
“He’s the most ubiquitous president ever,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian.
Political strategy
Dating back to his years as an outspoken property developer and reality TV star, Trump has relished being unavoidable for comment. But at age 79, he has been outdoing his younger self. And there is a logic to his wordiness.
Trump’s allies often speak of the political benefits of flooding the zone: pursuing so many policies, ideas and dramatic restructurings of the normal ways of governance as to overwhelm the system. “All pedal, no brake,” as Steve Bannon, Trump’s one-time adviser, has called it.
“We joke internally that he is our ultimate director of communications,” Leavitt said. “He has incredible media instincts and he is the final decision-maker on all policy, and he has been in a ‘flood the zone’, ‘do as much as possible’ mindset since he walked into the Oval Office on January 20th.”
All presidents benefit from the unique news-making powers of the office, with its agenda-setting influence over a dedicated global press corps. But Trump has outstripped his predecessors in focusing the public’s attention on to matters small and large – and limiting the level of scrutiny that any one shocking remark or policy proposal receives.
“People can really only focus on a handful of things a day,” said Bill Burton, a deputy White House press secretary under president Barack Obama. “This attention flood is working for Trump because he is able to do an extraordinary amount of executive actions and very little of it can get attention.”
Or as Brinkley put it: “He plays to win the day, every day, around the clock.”
Commentary
One of Trump’s political assets is his instinct for virality.
With a natural feel for the web, Trump has a knack for amplifying wacky memes and pop-culture happenings that can drive days of online discourse. Sometimes, coverage of his offhand remarks or late-night social media posts can crowd out the more significant, norm-shattering changes he is making to American governance.
Late one Friday night in May, the US president posted an obviously AI-generated image of himself as the pope. It struck a nerve.
Trump had already courted controversy days earlier, after the death of Pope Francis on April 21.
“I’d like to be pope,” the president told reporters who asked about who should become the next pontiff. “That would be my number one choice.”
The comment disturbed some Catholics, who said the notion was crude and insensitive. That reaction seemed only to prompt Trump to double down, posting the AI-generated image to his Truth Social account days later. By the weekend it had become a cultural phenomenon, mocked on “Saturday Night Live” and called out by experts as an example of misleading AI content.
Trump, who is not Catholic, had plenty of defenders, too. They said his commentary and the AI image were simply jokes, part of the president’s unique comedic style.
“As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen,” vice-president JD Vance, who is Catholic, wrote on the social platform X.
In his quest for attention, the president is often aided by a cottage industry of right-wing influencers and activists who are primed to syndicate, reinforce and defend whatever content he pushes out each day. For this conservative media ecosystem, Trump’s messaging and commentary are the raw fuel that drives clicks, shares and views.
On June 7th, the president’s visit to a raucous UFC event – complete with a “Trump dance” entrance into the arena – generated an immediate spike in online interest, including about 50,000 posts on X. Five days later, when he promoted a “Trump gold card” visa, his announcement led to roughly 30,000 posts on X.
Distraction
One pattern in Trump’s behaviour: When his administration is faced with bad news, he launches an ambush of distraction.
This can take the form of outlandish, out-of-left-field claims about political opponents. Or he might weigh in on a pop-culture subject far afield from Washington politics – from the ratings of late-night hosts like Seth Meyers to the physical appearance of a megastar like Taylor Swift.
The events of July 2025 offer a case in point.
As the Jeffrey Epstein files returned to the news – along with speculation that Trump might appear in them – the president embarked on a breathtaking series of tangents. Trump claimed without evidence that former US president Bill Clinton had bankrolled an effort by senior intelligence officials to frame him for a crime, mused about stripping actress Rosie O’Donnell of her US citizenship and accused singer Beyoncé of accepting millions of dollars to endorse his erstwhile rival, former vice-president Kamala Harris.
On July 18th, the Justice Department filed a request to unseal grand jury testimony about Epstein, again raising questions about Trump’s involvement. The president promptly lobbed insults at late-night talkshow hosts, dismissed the Epstein affair as “fake news” and shared fresh claims about a supposed Obama administration plot to undermine him after the 2016 election.
On July 25th, The Wall Street Journal published a major scoop: The paper had unearthed a risqué birthday letter that Trump had apparently written to Epstein in 2003. Trump responded with his attack on Beyoncé and revived his threat to revoke the broadcast licences of TV networks. Then he announced the imminent construction of an enormous gilded ballroom at the White House, at a cost of $200 million. (He has since revised the cost upward to $400 million.)
Asked if there was a deliberate strategy to distract from negative news, Leavitt noted that every administration seeks to minimise unhelpful headlines.
“Yes, there have been times in which we’ve tried to do that, but also often it just happens naturally, because the president is willing to weigh in on so many subjects,” she said. “Sometimes it’s really not deliberate. It’s just him speaking his mind on whatever news cycle or news story is brought to him in that moment.”
New tricks
Trump’s devotion to Truth Social mirrors the hair-trigger Twitter habit of his first term; on one recent December evening, he posted 158 times between 9pm and midnight. And he has continued to appear on Fox News with certain preferred hosts.
But in the first year of his second term, he added to his media arsenal by appearing in many more public spaces that fall outside a president’s typical itinerary.
Trump has stopped by a Washington Commanders NFL game, popped up in the New York Yankees locker room, attended the Ryder Cup golf tournament and the men’s tennis final at the US Open, sat in the front row at numerous UFC fights and travelled to the Daytona 500. He is the first sitting US president to attend a Super Bowl. When Fifa staged the Club World Cup final in New Jersey, Trump not only attended, but joined the winning team onstage for the trophy ceremony.
The net effect is a sense of inescapability, that no corner of American life remains Trump-free – which itself amounts to a potent expression of presidential authority and command. “His power, in part,” said Burton, the former Obama aide, “comes from the attention that people give him, or that he forces on them.”
Too much?
In the autumn of 2009, Obama appeared on David Letterman’s talkshow, gave interviews to CNBC and Men’s Health magazine, and made the rounds of all five major network Sunday shows. Washington was abuzz about whether he was overexposed.
That debate sounds quaint today. But the question of whether a president can be too visible remains open.
“The public is being desensitised” to Trump’s omnipresence, argued Brinkley, the historian. “It starts becoming blather. The enemy for Trump isn’t Democrats; it’s the public being bored with the show.”
Leavitt said that if there were a risk to his ubiquity, “President Trump would not be president right now.” She added: “He is a businessman who speaks his mind and tells it like it is, and sometimes people don’t like that. But obviously the vast majority of our country does, or else he wouldn’t be in this office.”
During Trump’s first term, the public eventually tired of his frenzied pace. And in some ways, Trump appears to be slowing down physically as he approaches his 80th birthday in June (which he will celebrate in part by staging a nationally broadcast UFC fight on the White House lawn). He has appeared to fall asleep at some Oval Office meetings and he is holding fewer formal public events than he did at this point in 2017.
Still, Trump and his team have embraced the everywhere-all-at-once nature of modern media. Average Americans, busy with work and family, do not tune in for daytime news conferences or Cabinet meetings. Evening news broadcasts and local newspapers are no longer the primary vessels by which Americans learn about their commander in chief.
Instead, politics now suffuses our lives as a kind of ambient noise – via TikTok videos, social media posts, YouTube talkshows and family Facebook messages – never fully separate from our leisure pursuits. “Right now the game is attention, in terms of what’s culturally breaking through,” Burton said. “The fact that so much message exists is the point.”
Trump has both propelled this merging of culture and politics, and continues to strategically exploit it. In December, he became the first US president to personally host the Kennedy Center Honours, comparing himself onstage with Johnny Carson and musing that he would do a better job than Jimmy Kimmel.
“This is the greatest evening in the history of the Kennedy Center,” Trump told the crowd. “Not even a contest. There has never been anything like it.”
His performance aired in prime time on CBS on December 23rd.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
