Donald Trump held an Oval Office press conference today, taking questions from reporters for an extended period after opening with remarks on today’s middling but eminently spinnable February jobs report. The discussion ranged across a variety of subjects: Trump discussed the February numbers and tariffs, brought National Security Adviser Mike Waltz on to crisply (but broadly) discuss negotiations with Russia and Ukraine on a cease-fire, and talked about a few other topics besides.
He also made no real news whatsoever. Trump just sat there with barely so much as a news hook of an excuse and (after a few sidebar presentations) took questions in his own typically Trumpish way for a bit more than a half hour, sunk comfortably in the executive chair to chew the fat. Only one line from Trump came with potential foreshadowing: “There will always be changes, and adjustments,” in his tariff policy, he warned, promising that his ad hoc and opportunistic policy of tariffs today, carve-outs tomorrow, and a one-month delay by the weekend is ongoing, and the beatings will continue until morale improves.
The unnecessariness of it all is what strikes me as the most newsworthy aspect of today’s otherwise forgettable presser. To be sure, Trump’s relentlessly “available” first month and a half in office is a shocking change of pace from the ominously quiet somnambulance of the invisible Biden administration. Many of his fans of course consider this a welcome development — if you love Trump, well you’re sure getting a metric ton of Trump content from the Trump Expanded Cinematic Universe — and even I can’t complain on a professional level, if only because of the unceasing lack of writing fodder.
And that’s where I begin to question whether I, too, as an accidental member of the media, am being indirectly manipulated into making him the undisputed center of all attention. The president seeks to thoroughly dominate the news cycle now in a way he didn’t quite attempt even during his remarkably hectic first administration. I suspect that this is a strategy: He now knows better what he is doing.
Someone like Elon Musk seeks the spotlight out of a discernible need for praise and public attention. (Despite his money and manifest power, his inability to conceal this about himself is a crippling practical weakness.) But I have come to believe that Trump is a good deal different. However much he adores the attention — one assumes he does — he courts it daily for calculated reasons: If he is always the top conversation in the news, then he at least partially controls the media narrative all the time. All presidencies are captive to fate — “Events, dear boy, events” — but Trump’s willingness and, it must be granted, ability to keep himself always at the center of the news allows him a sort of agency in his fortunes that few presidents have ever had the media savvy to deploy.