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President Donald Trump marked the first anniversary of his second inauguration with an extended appearance in the White House briefing room on Tuesday, where he spent about 1 hour and 45 minutes discussing topics that included his relationship with foreign leaders and other matters, according to the Associated Press. The AP said the session reflected a broader pattern in Trump’s second term: using time, attention, and messaging to command the news cycle with few apparent constraints.
The AP described Trump’s approach as relying on virality and social media as a central accelerant, as opposed to what it framed as traditional presidential restraint. In that context, the story highlighted Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who said the president “exists loudly” and warned that “The president will play with fire,” adding that he had come “damn close” to playing with live hand grenades and that “That’s just the way he is.”
The Associated Press also pointed to a signature phrase that Trump has repeatedly used in social media posts. Based on data compiled by Roll Call Factba.se, the AP reported that Trump signed off on posts with the catchphrase “thank you for your attention to this matter” 242 times during his second term, often in capital letters and with exclamation points.
The AP said Trump’s sustained focus on attention stretches back decades, starting with his time in New York tabloids and later as a reality television figure, and that attention—positive or negative—has become a form of reward. Republican strategist Ron Bonjean, quoted by the AP, said Trump’s presence is constant: “He’s saying hello to you in the morning, and he says good night to you at the end of the day,” and added, “You’re never not going to hear from him.”
In the AP’s account, the technology environment around Trump has shifted since his first term. The AP reported that during his first administration, many Silicon Valley leaders were cold or hostile to him, and that Trump was banned from platforms including Twitter and Facebook after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The AP then said those technology leaders are now openly allied with Trump or friendly with him, citing the ownership of Twitter—now named X—by Elon Musk and the presence of Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg among technology executives who attended Trump’s inauguration last year.
The Associated Press said Trump’s second-term social-media operation leans on rapid content production, including artificial intelligence, with the stated goal of keeping the president at the forefront of online conversation. The AP quoted Nolan Higdon, a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who focuses on critical media literacy, saying, “The social media we’re talking about in Trump’s second term is not the social media of Trump’s first term,” and the AP described some posts as veering into crude territory.
While the AP said Trump’s strategy has been effective at driving disruption, it also described areas where it has produced distractions or constraints, pointing in particular to issues involving Jeffrey Epstein and affordability. The AP reported that Trump told supporters “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein,” then later signed a bill that called for Epstein files to be made public after congressional pressure, and that Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gov. J.B. Pritzker said the news cycle this month amounted to a distraction from the Epstein issue.
On affordability, the AP said Trump struggled to convince the public that he understood and was responding to concerns about high prices. The report said Trump called affordability challenges a “Democratic hoax,” tried to take action including a prime-time address last month, and that later efforts were drowned out by a “deluge of more jarring news.” The AP also cited a Michigan visit last week that it said was remembered for images of Trump making an obscene gesture at someone yelling at him from afar.
The AP linked those patterns to a central political challenge heading into an election year: persuading a broader swath of Americans that he can govern effectively. It said approval ratings are low for his handling of most issues and singled out health care, where it reported that only about 3 in 10 U.S. adults approved in a December AP-NORC poll. The AP also reported that about 4 in 10 U.S. adults approved of Trump’s immigration performance in a January AP-NORC poll, down from about half of Americans at the start of his first term.
As Democrats try to adjust their own approaches to competing for attention, the AP cited California Gov. Gavin Newsom hosting a podcast and mocking Trump on social media. The report also highlighted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, describing him as using digital-media tactics that included videos showing him in unscripted environments such as the New York City marathon.
The AP concluded that 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, told the AP that Trump is “the definition of unique” and predicted that whoever succeeds him—regardless of party—will communicate differently, saying “the velocity of the presidency will slow down,” a point reinforced by Basil Smikle, a former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party and a professor at Columbia University, who said, “They’re learning not to impose an old framework on a new paradigm.”