By STEVEN SLOAN, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — A stunning military intervention in Venezuela. Telling the New York Giants which coach to hire. Threats against Iran, Denmark, Greenland and Colombia. Posing with someone else’s Nobel Peace Prize. Dangling the potential of deploying U.S. troops in Minneapolis. Flipping off a critic. Announcing an aggressive round of tariffs. Threatening political enemies.
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For President Donald Trump, this blizzard was just the first half of January.
If a president’s most valuable currency is time, Trump operates as if he has an almost limitless supply, ever willing to share no matter the day, the hour or the circumstance.
He’s rewritten the role of the presidency in a divided country, commanding constant attention with little regard for consequences. For all his talk about strength, his approach leans more toward virality than virility with social media as his primary accelerant.
“The president exists loudly,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. “The president will play with fire. I haven’t seen him yet play with live hand grenades, but I’ve seen him come damn close. That’s just the way he is, and it’s not going to change.”
At least Trump thanks you in the process.
During his second term, the Republican president has signed off of his social media post with the catchphrase “thank you for your attention to this matter” 242 times, according to data compiled by Roll Call Factba.se. For good measure, he often uses all capital letters and a few exclamation points.
Trump’s decades of seeking attention
He has spent decades seeking attention, first in the New York tabloids and later as a reality television star. Attention, positive or negative, is its own reward. In the attention economy, Trump is what Wall Street might call a market maker.
The gambits often have a tenuous relationship with truth and sometimes involve misogyny or racism. They can step on the administration’s other priorities and don’t always bend political realities in Trump’s favor (see affordability concerns and the Epstein files ).
But they’re hard to ignore.
“He’s saying hello to you in the morning, and he says good night to you at the end of the day,” Republican strategist Ron Bonjean said. “You’re never not going to hear from him.”
In his second term, he observed even fewer constraints on where to assert his presence, with a fondness for sports. During September alone, Trump attended three major sporting events around New York City. His visit to the U.S. Open final forced long security lines and delayed the start of the match. The crowd — dominated by New York’s elite — booed him, but that didn’t matter. He was still on the stadium’s big screen and all over social media.
That’s where some of the biggest changes during Trump’s second term have unfolded.
During his first administration, many Silicon Valley leaders were cold — or outright hostile — to Trump. He was banned from platforms including Twitter and Facebook after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The leaders of those companies are now openly allied with Trump or at least friendly with him. Twitter is now named X and owned by Elon Musk, who led the Department of Government Efficiency during the first months of the second term and has returned to the president’s orbit after a brief falling-out. Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were among the technology executives who attended Trump’s inauguration last year.
AI quickly produces memes and videos
Trump, who’s not known to use a computer, this time has his own social media platform, where his team relies on fresh artificial intelligence technology to quickly produce memes and videos that keep the president at the forefront of the online conversation. Those posts often veer into crude territory, such as one in October that showed him wearing a crown, flying a plane, dumping excrement on his opponents.
“The social media we’re talking about in Trump’s second term is not the social media of Trump’s first term,” said Nolan Higdon, a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he focuses on critical media literacy.
For now, there are few brakes on Trump’s impulses.
House Speaker Mike Johnson brushed off the excrement post as “satire.” Vice President JD Vance, a devout Catholic, has defended Trump’s posts, including one depicting him as the pope. In an interview with Vanity Fair, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles described Trump, who doesn’t drink, as possessing an “alcoholic’s personality,” meaning he “operates (with) a view that there’s nothing he can’t do.”
Indeed, his approach has been remarkably successful in achieving the disruption he seeks to impose in the U.S. and abroad. He uses social media as a weapon, warning of aid that will be cut off to states that resist him. His posts regarding Greenland and Denmark sparked a genuine diplomatic crisis and raised questions about the long-term sustainability of NATO.
The two nagging exceptions revolve around Epstein and affordability.
After telling his supporters to “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein,” he eventually gave in to congressional pressure and signed a bill that earned overwhelming support on Capitol Hill calling for the files to be made public. The Justice Department has already missed deadlines for the release, and Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois have said the flurry of news this month has amounted to a distraction from the Epstein issue.
Trump has similarly struggled to convince the public that he understands and is responding to their concerns about high prices. After calling affordability challenges a “Democratic hoax,” he has tried to take action, including delivering a prime-time address last month. But that speech and more recent efforts, including the mortgage rate push, were quickly drowned by the deluge of more jarring news.
Indeed, a Michigan visit last week to talk about affordability may ultimately be best remembered for images of Trump delivering an obscene gesture at someone who was yelling at him from afar.
Trump’s central challenge
That underscores Trump’s central challenge heading into an election year that will test of his grip on power. While his hard-line approach may delight supporters, it does less to convince a broader swath of Americans that he’s an effective president.
Approval of Trump’s handling of most issues is low, but health care stands out as a particular weakness for him. Only about 3 in 10 U.S. adults approved of the way he was handling health care, according to a December AP-NORC poll. That was slightly lower than his overall approval. He’s also slipped on immigration since the start of his second term, when this stood out as a relative strength. According to a January AP-NORC poll, about 4 in 10 U.S. adults approve of his performance on immigration, down from about half of Americans toward the beginning of his first term.
Meanwhile, Democrats are taking stronger steps toward winning American attention spans. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, hosts a podcast and taunts Trump by mocking him on social media.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is perhaps the most successful Democrat to translate a digital media machine into political success. Over the course of about a year, the 34-year-old went from a relatively unknown state lawmaker to the leader of the nation’s largest city by introducing himself to voters with videos that showed him in unscripted environments, like the course of the New York City marathon.
“They’re learning not to impose an old framework on a new paradigm,” said Basil Smikle, a former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party and a professor at Columbia University.
The long-term question is whether Trump has fundamentally changed the presidency. Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary under then-President George W. Bush, said Trump “is the definition of unique” and predicted that the next president — regardless of party — will communicate differently.
“Whoever succeeds him,” Fleischer said, “the velocity of the presidency will slow down.”
Associated Press writer Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux contributed to this report.
