Made-for-TV moments from President Donald Trump’s second term
President Donald Trump has brought his TV showmanship to the White House for a second term with made-for-TV moments in his first 100 days.
WASHINGTON – Volodymyr Zelenskyy had come to discuss the war in Ukraine, but he ended up serving as a player in what can sometimes seem like a made-for-TV presidency.
With television cameras recording the Oval Office showdown, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance lectured the leader of Ukraine, arguing he hadn’t shown proper gratitude for the billions of dollars in military assistance the United States has given to his country. Sitting knee-to-knee, the leaders shook their hands and talked over each other.
Vance demanded Zelenskyy say thank you. Zelenskyy insisted he had, many times. Trump said Zelenskyy wasn’t acting thankful. On and on it went, for nearly an hour, until Trump decided he’d seen enough. He sent the news crews packing, with a final parting shot: “This is going to be great television, I will say that,” Trump said, grinning as he looked directly into the camera.
In Trump’s White House, there’s often great television. The second-term president, who was a TV reality star before trying his hand at politics, has taken the stagecraft skills he honed hosting 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” and put them to work in his latest turn as leader of the free world.
“He lives every day writing a script about his own reality in which he is the producer, director, screenwriter and star,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien said. “He thinks very cinematically about everything.”
100 days choreographed for TV
When you’re president, the world is a stage. In Trump’s case, it can sometimes function as a television studio.
On his first day back in office in January, the 78-year-old Trump signed a series of executive orders at a desk set up in the middle of a jam-packed sports arena filled with thousands of his cheering supporters. As a presidential aide described the contents of each order over a loudspeaker, Trump wrote his name on the documents in big, loopy letters and then held them up, one at a time, for the crowd and the television cameras to see.
Since then, Trump, who on April 30 will mark the 100th day of his second term, has held numerous events at the White House and across the country that seem choreographed for TV.
He turned the White House South Lawn into a one-day Tesla showroom floor, conducted a Kennedy Center board meeting from a concert hall stage and hosted what he called a “Liberation Day” event in the Rose Garden to roll out sweeping new tariffs. At that event, he held up a giant chart showing which countries would be hit with tariffs, and by how much. At one point, he paused briefly and asked: “Would anyone like a hat?” then tossed a red cap into the crowd. “Saturday Night Live” – the NBC comedy show Trump once hosted in 2015 – spoofed his theatrics days later.
The first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl
In February, Trump showed up at Super Bowl LIX, making him the first sitting president to attend football’s premier annual sporting event, which also happens to be TV’s ultimate ratings magnet. He strolled the sidelines of the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, posed for photos, shook hands and then headed for a suite. The TV cameras cut to him as he watched from the 50-yard line as the Philadelphia Eagles throttled the Kansas City Chiefs. (He had predicted a Kansas City victory.)
Trump relies on many of the tropes and conventions of reality TV to get across his point as president, said Danielle Lindemann, a sociology professor at Lehigh University and author of “True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.”
The reality TV genre relies heavily on branding, she said, and “Donald Trump is in many ways a master of branding. He has a trademark hairstyle, a signature lingo – ‘fake news,’ ‘sleepy Joe’ – and he also uses his political platform to call attention to his business ventures. The whole thing is like an exercise in self-branding.”
Reality TV also tends to rely on stereotypes and heroes and villains, Lindemann said. “In his narratives, Trump often draws on these kind of broad characters – like ‘bad hombres,’ ‘nasty women,’” she said. “It goes on and on.”
Trump’s testy Oval Office exchange with Zelenskyy – and his quip that it would make great television – was revealing, Lindemann said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
From ‘The Apprentice’ to the White House
Trump, a cable news junkie, was a pop culture personality for years before the Internet made its way into American homes.
A wealthy real-estate developer, he was the author of a bestselling, how-to-succeed book called “The Art of the Deal,” a fixture in the gossip pages of New York’s tabloids and a regular on TV shows like “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” He even made a cameo in the popular film “Home Alone 2.”
But it was the television show “The Apprentice” that brought him into American homes once a week for 14 years.
Episodes would end with the dismissal of one contestant and with Trump delivering the bad news in what became his trademark line: “You’re fired!”
Aspiring to film school
Trump has long admired legendary Hollywood filmmakers like Darryl Zanuck and Cecil B. DeMille, and the show appealed to his flair for drama. As a young man, he had wanted to go to film school after college, but his father warned that, if he did, he would not become part of the family real-estate business, O’Brien said.
Though he would make his mark in the world of real estate, he never gave up completely on show business. He made it part of the Trump brand.
“He loves the idea of showmanship,” O’Brien said. “It’s just central to his thinking. He thinks very cinematically about everything.”
When he decided to try his hand at politics, Trump kicked off his 2016 campaign for president by riding down an escalator in the gilded Manhattan high-rise bearing his name.
Before taking office, he informed top aides that they should think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes his rivals, according to a report by The New York Times. People close to Trump told the newspaper that, during his first year in office, he spent at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as twice that, in front of a television, monitoring cable news.
A White House with drama and ‘reality’ stars
During his first term, Trump ramped up the drama.
He fired staffers and announced new policy decisions on social media platforms like Twitter, now X. He brought one of his favorite contestants on “The Apprentice,” Omarosa Manigault Newman, to the White House to work as a political aide and then derided her as “wacky” when she left and wrote an unflattering tell-all.
He surprised the gravely ill conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh by awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the 2020 State of the Union, a formal address covered live by the television networks but usually reserved for unveiling legislative policy proposals.
When it came time to campaign for a second term, as COVID was ravaging the country, Trump accepted the GOP nomination and delivered his acceptance speech from the White House South Lawn. He also held other campaign-style events there, too, making for good TV but breaking with protocol. Until then, White House landmarks like the South Lawn and the Rose Garden had been off limits to campaign theatrics.
Presidential scholar Barbara Perry calls Trump “the P.T. Barnum of politics.” Like the famous entrepreneur and circus impresario, Trump is the master of his own spectacle, someone who says and does things that will draw people in and get them to watch, she said.
In Trump’s case, the target audience is “people who believe in MAGA, believe in Donald Trump and believe that he is the different change agent – to change the government, to change our position on the world stage, to change our economy,” said Perry, a presidential studies professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
Back in the White House in January after a four-year hiatus during Joe Biden’s presidency, Trump has filled his administration with people who have experience in front of TV cameras.
His transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, is a former TV reality personality who became famous as a cast member of MTV’s “The Real World: Boston.” Mehmet Oz, who Trump picked to serve as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, appeared regularly for five seasons as the resident medical expert on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” before landing his own syndicated series.
Linda McMahon, Trump’s education secretary, spent decades in the wrestling industry as co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE, which is known for its theatrics. During her years in the professional fighting world, she was lured into the ring on more than one occasion. Video clips show her satirically slapping other people and getting thrown around by towering, bulky men.
Several of Trump’s appointees followed his lead and, in an unusual twist, have become the stars of their own reality.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, regularly posts videos on his official X account that show him doing pushups and working out with soldiers half his age. Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, posted a video on X in which he sits on the edge of a desk and talks about the agency’s mission as images of fires, floods and American flags flash across the screen.
Then there’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who has amplified her own profile with a series of videos that are at times the subject of controversy.
In one, Noem stands inside a high-security El Salvador prison that is holding hundreds of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration. “If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” Noem warns as shirtless, tattooed inmates crowded on open bunks watched from behind bars.
Internet sleuths noticed something else: Noem was wearing a Rolex that reportedly sells for $50,000. She was criticized by some for her expensive timepiece and for using prisoners as production props. Her office dismissed the criticism and said she bought the watch from the proceeds of her best-selling books and planned to one day pass it down to her children.
‘A campaign approach to being a world leader’
As president, Trump often disparages and feuds with the news media.
Yet at least 20 Fox News personalities have landed high-level positions in his second administration, according to the watchdog group Media Matters for America. Several other frequent guests on the conservative television network ended up in Cabinet positions, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi and National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard.
Trump himself frequently interacts with the press – more so than his predecessors, and other presidents. In the first 50 days of his second term, he conducted 53 short question-and-answer sessions with reporters, held five formal news conferences and granted 11 interviews, said Martha Kumar, who tracks White House communications and is professor emerita at Towson University in Maryland.
That is more than any of his six predecessors. Bill Clinton was second, with 47 short Q&A sessions, five news conferences and three interviews during the first 50 days of his presidency, Kumar said. Ronald Reagan, an actor before he became a politician, held just three Q&A’s, two news conferences and 11 interviews during his first 50 days in office.
O’Brien, the Trump biographer, sees Trump’s reality show approach to the presidency as an attempt to make sure he stays center stage and controls the narrative while keeping his opponents and critics off balance.
Trump is using his made-for-TV events and showmanship to connect emotionally with his supporters and with others who aren’t convinced he should hold the power and influence that comes with the office, he said.
But, O’Brien said, “that’s essentially a campaign approach to being a world leader.”
As president, Trump has an advantage he did not have as a reality TV star. Ensconced in office for four years, he doesn’t have to worry that his audience will grow tired of his act.
Barring impeachment, something he has already managed to survive twice, his White House show can’t be canceled.
Follow Michael Collins on X @mcollinsNEWS