Donald Trump’s nonstop news-making can be exhausting, making it harder for people to scrutinize his presidential actions

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, 2025.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jennifer Mercieca, Texas A&M University

Jennifer Mercieca does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.