'Relentless media offensive'': How Trump has turned 'presidential communication into the WWE'

To President Donald Trump's critics, one of the many troubling things about him is his inflammatory attacks on the press — which he describes as "the enemy of the people." Yet Trump craves publicity, and he is known for watching Fox News nonstop in the White House.

In an article published on May 10, The Guardian's David Smith describes the over-the-top "media offensive" that Trump is carrying out during his second presidency.

"Over the past three and a half months," Smith explains, "the U.S. president and his team have launched a relentless media offensive 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.

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Trump, according to Smith, has "turned the White House into a quasi-content provider."

"Presidential communications have come a long way," the Guardian reporter observes. "Woodrow Wilson held the first presidential press conference in 1913. Franklin Roosevelt pioneered radio with his informal 'fireside chats' 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, for example, during the Cuban missile crisis. Ronald Reagan, a former actor, relished televised addresses, earning the nickname 'The Great Communicator.'"

Smith continues, "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 — a single all caps tweet could dominate headlines, move financial markets or upend global diplomacy — and now his own Truth Social platform."

Tara Setmayer, founder of the Seneca Project and a Never Trump conservative, compares Trump's media events to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) — and she doesn't mean it in a good way.

Setmayer told The Guardian, "Donald 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. It’s literally turning presidential methods of communication into the WWE: the imagery, the immaturity, the outrageousness."

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Setmayer continued, "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."

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Read David Smith's full article for The Guardian at this link.