Like many other news organizations, The Associated Press maintains a “live updates” page, which posts the latest from the Trump administration in a ticker tape-like live scroll, with multiple updates per hour, 12 hours a day.
President Donald Trump has kept the ticker busy.
“Trump is moving with light speed and brute force to break the existing order and reshape America at home and abroad,” an Associated Press reporter wrote on Feb 22.
Many Americans find the amount and pace of news exhausting, confusing and overwhelming.
“How do you push back against a tidal wave?” political communication expert Dannagal Young wrote of this media phenomenon on Feb 21. “You can’t.”
I study the relationship between communication and democracy. I teach university classes on propaganda, presidential communication and the dark arts of communication, and I’m the author of an award-winning 2020 book on Trump’s communication strategies.
Deliberately overwhelming people with a flood of news content is a propaganda strategy used by authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin to distort reality and prevent people from clearly evaluating their government’s actions.
Trump communicates more than ‘The Great Communicator’
When Ronald Reagan’s first term as president began in 1981, several prominent political scientists noted in an analysis that a “week scarcely goes by without at least one major news story devoted to coverage of a radio or TV speech, an address to Congress, a speech to a convention, a press conference, a news release, or some other presidential utterance.”
It’s hard to believe that Reagan’s presidential communication only attracted one major news story per week, especially since he is often called “the Great Communicator.”
The 1980s had a slower, pre-digital news environment than that of the current day, to be sure. But Trump is also simply generating a lot more news content than Reagan did.
Today, Trump’s frequent press conferences, news releases, social media posts and other appearances and offhand remarks generate a constant flow of new stories and social media posts each day. The proliferation of cellphones and social media allows many people to follow the news throughout the day. People, in return, expect the president and other politicians to talk to the public constantly and often berate them when they fail to meet that expectation and go silent.
In fact, Trump is generating a lot more media content in his second term than he did in his first.
Trump’s intensified communication strategy
Reagan averaged about 5.8 news conferences per year. Trump averaged 22 per year in his first term, according to data collected by a nonpartisan group at the University of California Santa Barbara called the American Presidency Project. Former President Joe Biden averaged 9.25 per year.
Trump has already had 18 press gaggles or press conferences since taking office in January 2025.
A news analysis conducted by National Journal White House reporter George Condon showed that Trump has already answered more than 1,000 questions from reporters since he returned to office, which is nearly five times more questions than he answered at this point in his first presidency.
Trump has also made a lot of news by issuing almost 90 executive orders, which he has used both as a strategy for exercising executive power over issues like foreign aid and as a strategy for attracting media coverage.
Reagan issued 50 executive orders in his first year in office in 1981. Trump issued 72 executive orders within his first 30 days in 2025. That’s more executive orders than any previous president has issued in their first month over the last 40 years, including himself. He only issued 33 at this point in his first term in 2017.
Trump’s media strategy in his second term appears to intensify the approach he used in his first term. During Trump’s first term, according to The New York Times, “Mr Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”
As former Trump aide and current host of the show “War Room” Steve Bannon said in 2018, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
In 2025, in order to win the day’s news coverage, Trump is flooding the media with an unrelenting tidal wave of news content to dominate and vanquish the zone.
This strategy is evident in the Oval Office executive order signing events. Trump literally makes news by signing a large piece of paper in front of cameras and reporters. These events are carefully staged political theater for media consumption in which Trump casts himself as the nation’s hero protecting it from foreign invasions, diversity programs or paper straws.
Many of Trump’s executive orders are facing legal challenges, and some have been shot down by federal judges. Nonetheless, it is the spectacle of signing the orders that I, as a communications scholar, believe is designed to win the day – they are effective at generating news coverage and making Trump look powerful.
“Trump, as we know from this first month, is the most news-making person to occupy the Oval Office I’ve ever seen,” said New York Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn on Feb 27.
A strategy of control
Media scholar Marshall McLuhan famously argued in 1964 that “The medium is the message.” Likewise, with Trump, the communication strategy is the message.
Communication is a tool. It can be used to promote democracy or to erode it. Any politician’s communication strategy reveals, at least in part, how they think about governing, power and democracy. Some political leaders communicate in ways that encourage people to ask questions and use their reason and critical thinking skills to evaluate public policies.
Other political leaders use communication in undemocratic ways to manipulate and coerce, preventing citizens from using their reason and critical thinking skills to evaluate policies.
What does Trump’s tidal wave of news content say about how he thinks about governing, power and democracy?
As a media and governing strategy, I think that creating an unrelenting tidal wave of content is designed to enable Trump to attract and keep the nation’s attention on himself and – in the process, drown out other voices.
This method overwhelms the media and exhausts many Americans who cannot easily absorb so much information at once.
And the tidal wave strategy prevents the public from scrutinizing the president’s actions – because no one can push back against a tidal wave.
Jennifer Mercieca is Professor of Communication and Journalism, Texas A&M University.
The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.
© The Conversation
15 Comments
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I'veSeenFootage
That's not a bug, it's a feature. Steve Bannon explained this tactic years ago. Problem is: it's not working as well as they think. People have more than enough available brain capacity (...at least most people) to be outraged by the Trump admin's violent policies, offended by their unlawful actions AND appaled by their stupid mistakes, all at the same time. It's not that hard. Tiring, but not hard.
TaiwanIsNotChina
I suspect it will eventually lead to even dullards being angered by the constant chaos. Then you have the fact that the fascists don't even know what their own plan is.
Namahage
It's the dead cat strategy,as used by Boris Johnson .
kohakuebisu
Yeah, he calls it "flood the zone".
It does work in the short term, but as Aesop told us, you can't keep crying "Wolf!" forever. Not when inflation is destroying people's quality of life and they are down to one salary because whatever government department it was has just fired their spouse.
Ricky Kaminski13
It must be exhausting having to find so much danger and fault in so much stuff. Make sure you give yourselves at least one ‘Trump hysteria free day’ a week folks, because you as an individual lamenting over everything has zero effect on anything other than your own health.
chatanista
If it is too exhausting for AP, it is free to refrain from its live updates.
virusrex
Nothing in the article says the news are exhausting for the media companies, if anything it could be said they find this beneficial since it makes people click and buy things.
The ones finding it exhausting are those that consume those news, and as commented this is one of the purposes, not an undesirable side effect, of spamming them.
Bob Fosse
What’s really dumb is this divisive politics. Everything he does will just be reversed or overturned next time a Democrat takes office. Working together might actually achieve something lasting and impactful.
TaiwanIsNotChina
It's a shame they didn't leave him in that classroom for some remedial education.
GuruMick
Taiwan...when you have "lost the dullards, you have lost America "
itsonlyrocknroll
Look, sitting in the vice chair is JD Vance, entered this world August 2, 1984,
Unless the democrat opposition steps back from belly button gazing, weaponizing Joe Biden, Obama judiciary.
JD Vance could well be number 48. two terms.
Get a grip now!
bass4funk
Has nothing to do with having brain cells, since the majority of the MSM tilts left and hates Trump with a passion, they will focus only on stories and take a negative viewpoint, regurgitate it and pass it along to other networks and try to slam Trump all day, this why FNC dominates and in the meantime, CNN, msnbc are hemorrhaging pundits like crazy, and second, Trump has a mandate and come hell or high-water he is going to fulfill his objective and the more the few so-called intellectually-challenged scream and whine and pout, it will not change their destiny, and it won't help their party.
GBR48
It's a bit cleverer than described. Unlike many democratic regimes, there isn't a party in power facing a party in opposition - a cabinet and a shadow cabinet.
The flaw in the presidential system (which Trump is exploiting) is that he can become the government - effectively an absolute monarch - by continuously legislating by executive order. Thus, the constant focus on him has made the rest of the USG - the two houses - compliant (courtesy of Republican majorities) to the point of irrelevance, and erased any real political opposition.
So Trump, as absolute monarch, is in charge, and any opposition comes from the courts.
He then uses speed to limit the effectiveness of this opposition - the US legal system is slow on a good day, and the rate of cases is slowing it further. A judge can order people back to work, but most will do nothing or random jobs, whilst waiting to be fired. Sensible ones will target other jobs. In some cases they don't have anywhere to go back to, regardless of any court order. Thus, the courts are persistently short circuited by shock and awe tactics.
His final gambit is that a Republican supreme court will back him. It might lean towards him, but I'm not sure any lawyer will happily sign off on much of the stuff Trump has done.
But the Republicans have planned this (far better than the Democrats planned for the last election). Most of what Trump has done can be done legally, if more slowly. So presumably that is their fallback.
And whilst Canada may be one for the headlines, Greenland is serious. It is an extension of the Alaska Purchase and the Louisiana Purchase, and syncs in with the Manifest Destiny stuff. Money for resources and land.
Trump 1.0 was a bumpy road to nowhere. But the Democrats forcing him to run again and win to avoid prison, whilst failing to prepare, has led to Trump 2.0. And whilst he bumbles his way through press conferences like an angry 12 year old with issues, there is a plan at work here, and there is money too (Musk).
virusrex
When the actions all have obvious negative impact it is just not possible to force a positive twist. The current government is making a lot of mistakes and taking actions that demand criticism, what you are trying to argue is for the media to hide all those things and instead present something either false or irrelevant but positive. That is not something people should be demanding from the media.
bass4funk
The flaw in the presidential system (which Trump is exploiting) is that he can become the government - effectively an absolute monarch - by continuously legislating by executive order. Thus, the constant focus on him has made the rest of the USG - the two houses - compliant (courtesy of Republican majorities) to the point of irrelevance, and erased any real political opposition.
Predominantly from liberal activist judges
They don't have to like it, that is irrelevant. They just need to follow the Constitution. Most of these will fall Trump's way.
True
The plan is to save the nation from falling into unreparable decline.