Donald Trump’s hot war is part of the deal

The US president is not the first to be obsessed with his public image.

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Since Donald Trump took office in January 2017, he has issued tens of thousands of tweets — some positive, some angry, some serious, some bonkers. Invariably, the media reacts, as do we, the public. We might write a letter to the editor, post a reply, retweet, like, dislike or shake a fist at the screen.

This may seem like a dynamic peculiar to our current moment, but while the technology may be relatively new, the underlying human story is as old as the Republic. We Americans are obsessed with our presidents.

The vigour of this ongoing obsession is well reflected in a raft of new books: Jason Stahl’s America’s Presidents: Ranked From Best to Worst; Robert Spencer’s Rating America’s Presidents; David S. Reynolds’s Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times; Fredrik Logevall’s JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956; Jonathan Alter’s His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.

But all these recent releases and our compulsive monitoring of presidential news reflect only part of the picture. What often escapes notice is presidents’ equally intense obsession with how they are viewed and their efforts to influence public opinion.

Trump’s hot war on the “lamestream” media tests the boundary between freedom of the press and presidential power in a way that may feel uniquely combative. But in The Presidents vs. the Press, Harold Holzer reminds us that this has happened before. Although George Washington enjoyed “the longest-ever press honeymoon in the history of the American presidency”, baldly partisan newspapers eventually went on the attack. In response, Washington, aided by Alexander Hamilton, backed John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States to act as the “quasi-official administration mouthpiece”.

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln shut down anti-Union papers and seized control of the North’s telegraph lines. He saw his suppression of the press as crucial to preserving the Union. Holzer writes: “The leader who later gained fame as the ‘Great Emancipator’ began his presidency as the ‘Great Censor’.”

In the 20th century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt emerged as a brilliant communicator, hosting a whopping 998 news conferences during his 12 years in office. His innovative “fireside chats”, via radio, signalled a revolution in communication, allowing him to reach into Americans’ living rooms, assuage their fears during the Great Depression and, not incidentally, circumvent the print media. Presidents have mastered the press milieu of their time in various ways — Theodore Roosevelt with his indomitable energy, Ronald Reagan with his affability and actor’s polish, Bill Clinton with his empathy — but the true communication pioneers were the ones who recognised the power of new technology to connect directly with citizens and shape public opinion. John Kennedy’s use of televised news conferences qualifies, as does Barack Obama’s embrace of the internet.

President Trump is a pioneer. He sees most media organisations as adversaries and works against and around them with instinctive skill. It’s strange to think of his tweets as somehow equivalent to FDR’s fireside chats, but they are. Holzer argues that, “love him or loathe him”, Trump is “one of the most effective communicators in White House history”.

Of course, he has been helped by a highly partisan 24/7 cable news cycle and the social media platforms that carry his sound bites. In Terms of Disservice: How Silicon Valley Is Destructive by Design, Harvard researcher Dipayan Ghosh argues companies like Facebook (his former employer), Twitter and Google have caused “widespread damage” to “the American media ecosystem” by favouring profit over public good. He points to social media firms’ reluctance to mediate content posted by the president as a central force undermining political discourse.

Not surprisingly, Ghosh thinks these platforms should be regulated. He calls for a new social contract for digital business that prioritises the security and interests of consumers and acknowledges the responsibility of owning such vast information networks. The final chapter provides a detailed, if radical, blueprint for a regulatory framework that is sure to spur debate.

In the new-media age Ghosh describes, the idea of long-form presidential writing as an effective image-shaping tool may strike some as overly analog. However, in Author in Chief and its follow-up, The Best Presidential Writing: From 1789 to the Present, Craig Fehrman draws on more than 10 years of research to make a compelling contrary argument.

He explains John Adams was the first president to write a memoir, and traces the others who followed suit: Andrew Jackson, with the first campaign biography; Calvin Coolidge, whose intimate autobiography, published soon after he left office, was hugely popular. JFK wrote Profiles in Courage before he was in office, a tradition continued by Obama, with his Dreams From My Father, and Trump, The Art of the Deal.

While the mutual obsession between us and our presidents will no doubt continue it’s important to remember that, ultimately, we determine our political leaders’ fate and legacy. Lincoln once said: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed”.

Harvard Business Review