President Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, likes to say that his administration is the most transparent in history. Possibly, she is right.
That is, if you think letting it all hang out is the kind of transparency Leavitt has in mind.
Certainly, it all hangs out in a way we have never seen in Washington. Trump has turned the Oval Office into a kind of television studio where he insults the press, talks to foreign leaders and, on occasion, berates them (Ukraine, South Africa and Canada) in front of the press.
Then there is the president’s late-night posting on Truth Social, when a meteor shower of invective, scorn, misinformation, disinformation, self-adulation, and allegations, interspersed with policy declarations, reveals him unedited. In those posts, he has urged colonizing Greenland, taking over Canada and, recently, adding Venezuela as the 51st state.
All of it set about with capital letters, exclamation points and AI-generated pictures — some of the most offensive ones have included Trump as Jesus, the Obamas as apes and, more recently, Illinois Gov. JD Pritzker gorging on an enormous hamburger.
The insults keep coming, accusing enemies and even his predecessors of being weak, having low IQs and, of course, being “losers.” In this scathing and self-aggrandizing stream, some are even traitors, including former President Barack Obama. Arrest him!
It is a bravura performance without equal. It is also hugely popular with diehard devotees of the president. His account on Truth Social has 12.5 million subscribers. One night recently, there were 55 posts — some clearly composed and some forwarded from right-wing sources, alleging conspiracies, malfeasance or trumpeting Trump.
Journalists assigned to read them have called them variously rampages, rants, wild sprees and storms. But read them, they must.
This is Trump in a stream of consciousness, unvarnished, and an essential source of news because what the president of the United States says is news.
Traces of varnishing have been appearing: The number of spelling mistakes, bizarre word formations and grammatical errors has gone down, even as the volume has accelerated.
The Wall Street Journal has revealed the unseen hand on the keyboard. It is the hand of Natalie Harp, the president’s personal assistant, an influential but unsung force in the White House.
Harp, according to the Journal, scours fringe news and social media for repostable comments and produces AI-generated illustrations. She then hands them to Trump. He selects and adds them to his own comments, and a post is born.
Sometimes the posting is feverish. The night the Iran War began, there were more than 90 posts.
Harp, 34, is the epitome of a Christian conservative, coming from a religious family in California and attending two Christian-right universities, Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego and Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. She came to Trump’s attention when she was reporting and hosting for the ultra-conservative television network One America News. He asked her to join his presidential campaign.
Don’t think that Trump and Harp’s overnight spewing is wasted. He has all those followers on Truth Social, but his real strength is that the mainstream media is obliged to quote some of his comments daily.
What Trump says on Truth Social is also heard around the world. It isn’t just journalists who follow it; nations have to pay attention. In capitals from Tehran to Moscow, London to Beijing, Trump-raging is essential reading.
The Trump Show, for that is what it is, is a radical departure from how presidents have traditionally communicated with the public. Trump posts directly, sometimes without regard for how his words will be received.
It used to be that speeches were the window through which the world could see how an American president was thinking. They were crafted, agonized over, passed around, redrafted and sometimes delivered with last-minute handwritten additions or subtractions by the president.
They were policy documents for the present and the future. With Trump, it is the improvisations that inform or confuse.
Presidential speeches through the years have given us history’s milestones, whether it was Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address or FDR’s First Inaugural Address.
Who can forget the speeches of JFK in Berlin, Reagan at the Berlin Wall or Obama in Cairo?
With Trump, it is the firehose delivery that is remembered, especially in overnight posts. Transparent?
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