As a politician, Donald Trump has always been almost unmatched in his ability to direct and steer the media in ways that benefit him.
Throughout his first term, Trump was excellent at making sudden policy reversals and grand, out-of-the-blue announcements that would leave the legacy media scrambling to keep up and therefore keep news consumers from looking too closely at his actual actions for too long. He would completely make up accomplishments and great political victories and operate as if they were real. And he would frequently post purposefully provocative tweets that would take an overwhelmingly popular position and word it in the perfect way to generate a complete meltdown from progressive and establishment opponents.
With that last strategy especially, Trump was able to turn what was, on the surface, a profoundly negative relationship with the legacy press into a persistent political advantage. In truth, the media, which enjoyed a massive “Trump bump” in engagement and revenue, was incentivized to play along. At least until Trump’s fans did the “unthinkable” at the Capitol on January 6 and Trump was booted off social media.
As the Biden years began, the media did what they could have done from the beginning had they actually been as anti-Trump as they presented themselves in his first term: they ignored him.
The former president retreated to his resort in Florida, and both the media and politically-active public turned their attention to the Biden administration. However, that attention quickly turned into a major political disadvantage for Biden and the rest of the political establishment. There were several policy disasters that played out during the Biden years. But the biggest, or at least, most politically damaging one, was the historic surge in price inflation that hit a little over a year into Biden’s presidency—the delayed but unavoidable consequence of the trillions of dollars the government printed and injected straight into the economy during the pandemic.
More so than even the visible waves of migrants at the southern border, the outbreak of war in Ukraine and Gaza, and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the persistent price inflation upset even the most non-political corners of the public and left the administration looking at first inept when the problem wouldn’t go away and later uncaring when they decided to, in a way, emulate Trump and just pretend everything was great.
That all but handed the 2024 election to Donald Trump. All he had to do was present himself as the candidate who really did care about the economic pain Americans were feeling. Trump’s default refrain about how his opponent’s economy was the worst the country had ever seen hit closer to home than it usually would have. And it was during the campaign that he really began to return to form as a media manipulator.
Once back in office, Trump returned to his familiar media strategies, but with much more emphasis than the first time around. Winning the optics game, which had once seemed like a means for accomplishing traditional political ends, was now the president’s primary focus.
Because, unlike in Trump’s first term, when even he himself seemed a little surprised to have won and had clearly been forced to start off on his back foot, in his second and final term Trump has been very focused on one clear, overarching goal: cementing his legacy.
He’s building a massive new ballroom that will be the dominant physical fixture of the White House once it’s completed. He has been in a battle to get his name added to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, going so far as to close the entire thing if he can’t get his way. And he’s ordered the construction of a 250-foot arch modeled after Paris’ Arc de Triomphe in Washington, DC.
Trump has also leaned into the spectacle with his actions. He’s ordered strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. He unleashed ICE agents to carry out highly visible, chaotic, and sometimes deadly immigration raids to make it appear like mass deportations are happening when they aren’t. And he staged a “Liberation Day” ceremony in the Rose Garden where he made it look like he had started a new protectionist age where tariffs would bring about a golden age of American manufacturing and the country would be free from its dependency on foreign producers, only to walk almost all of the new tariffs back a few days later.
And then there’s Trump’s effort to leave his legacy on the world stage.
After returning to the White House, he quickly launched an air campaign to destroy the Houthis of Yemen. He then launched Operation Midnight Hammer last summer to “obliterate” Iran’s nuclear program. And then, at the beginning of this year, he ordered a military operation to grab Nicolas Maduro and take control of Venezuela. Every case, according to Trump, was an unbelievable, historic success.
That approach of essentially creating and stoking delusions of success in the minds of voters is not actually a bad strategy for a politician. In fact, as Trump’s rise in politics could represent, it could well be the best political strategy.
As I and others have explained elsewhere, the nature of the state—and the democratic political process especially—alienates actors from the direct, immediate consequences of their choices more than we find in any other sphere of life. This means we have a lot more room in our role as voters to maintain a completely delusional worldview that is entirely removed from reality than we do in our roles as employees, business owners, and heads of households.
Trump, more than any other political candidate or politician in modern American history, used that fact to his advantage. He played on the fact that voters want to believe that the politician they supported is a remarkable success. And that, at least initially, voters have no reason not to believe what they want, even if it has no basis in reality. Trump leans into this by frequently spinning up fake wins that his supporters are quick to accept as real.
This drove Trump’s critics and political opponents crazy in his first term. But these days, the more sophisticated ones are following suit.
The best example of that is New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. In a very Trump-like fashion that may, on the surface, feel different from Trump because it targets a completely different audience, Mamdani has also twisted the truth to present his supporters with entirely fake accomplishments.
For example, in May, Mamdani published a two-minute video in which he claimed his administration had eliminated the city’s $12 billion budget deficit without cutting any social services by eliminating waste and raising taxes on the rich.
The video was, in the absolute most charitable interpretation, extremely misleading. The money Mamdani cited as having been raised for the budget in the video was almost entirely a combination of the highest end of estimated revenue from proposed taxes and DOGE-style agency reviews that hadn’t been implemented yet (and, if they were, would likely generate far less), as well as a temporary delay of pensions and other payouts to future years and a multi-billion dollar bailout from the New York state government. The narrative the mayor put forward that his team had quickly and easily eliminated a large deficit was blatantly fictitious.
But it didn’t matter. Mamdani’s fans wanted to believe what he was suggesting in the video and faced no immediate personal downside for doing so. Again, in a very Trumpian fashion, the mayor created the impression of a political success where there was none. And to this day, many still believe it to be true.
However, as we’re starting to see take shape with Trump, as much room as political power and the democratic process give people to adopt and operate within completely delusional worldviews, reality always catches up.
That is what Trump has been forced to reckon with after he launched his war on Iran back in February. What he reportedly believed—or was led to believe—would be a quick routing of the Iranian regime has dragged on for months and grown into a highly destructive regional war that is still escalating today. And although Trump was always going to face political difficulty on the “affordability” front after he showed no interest in addressing the root causes of the artificially high prices Americans now face, his new war threw fuel on the fire by locking up a substantial portion of the world’s oil supply.
Trump has tried to fall back on his usual strategies by declaring the war to have just ended in a historic American victory dozens of times. And, more recently, as that narrative is getting harder to sustain, he’s pulling out all the stops to distract the media and public from his failure in the Middle East.
So far he’s done a fairly good job at that. Late last month, he posted an old magazine’s ranking of the presidents with him photoshopped in at the top, which sparked days of debate over what people mistakenly thought was his personal ranking of past presidents. More recently, he attempted to claim another “historic” win on the world stage with a new Greenland deal with Denmark, which is, if you actually look at it, essentially a continuation of the status quo. And he’s leaning into political sensationalism with his sudden ban of several media outlets from the White House press pool and bizarre announcements like how the DC arch he’s building will actually be an active military installation housing snipers and drones.
The distractions and bluster may continue to work for a bit. But the fact remains that Trump has done very little to improve the material well-being of the American people and quite a lot to worsen it. He has shown no interest in taking on the entrenched power structure in Washington or the various ways the political class is enriching itself at the expense of the American people—the very mechanisms driving the cost-of-living crisis Trump ran on addressing. And the new “anti-establishment” figures on the left like Mamdani have already made it clear that that lack of interest is bipartisan.
So while Trump’s approach to politics will almost certainly outlast his time in power and be carried forward by politicians in both parties, the problems these politicians run on fixing will persist and grow worse.
But there is at least some reason for hope. Because reality is not optional. It always reasserts itself eventually. And when it does, the advantage lies with those who refuse to abandon it.
