When President Donald Trump strode out of the White House to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a camera tracked his movements. The moment when Trump greeted his visitor was captured on video and quickly posted to social media.

Something similar happened when Trump signed an executive order keeping biological males out of women’s sports under Title IX. “You know, if you’d like to gather around me, I think I’m going to be OK,” he said to the young student-athletes gathered for the event. “Come on.” Soon, he was surrounded at his desk by mostly little girls. “What a nice picture this is, huh?”

By now, Trump’s mastery of political showmanship is nothing new. He raised his profile as a real estate developer with frequent media interviews and television appearances. He became a bona fide reality TV star. In his first presidential campaign, he was able to overcome fundraising disadvantages through massive earned — read: free — media by dominating the airwaves. With the help of his 18-year-old son Barron, Trump once again dominated a new media landscape last year, appearing on podcasts whose audiences sometimes dwarfed those of traditional news programs. Grazed by an assassin’s bullet, Trump still knew where the camera was. 

What is different this time around is that Trump isn’t alone. He was widely mocked for picking so many nominees for the new Trump administration who had television backgrounds themselves, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy chief among them. Vanity Fair said Trump was “building his Fox News administration,” while the New York Times ran a headline the day before the inauguration saying, “Fox News prepares to cover a government filled with Fox News alumni.” 

But it is no longer just about having a few telegenic standouts who can represent Trump on the Sunday talk shows, a trait that in the first term occasionally led to hires the president came to regret. Trump has a small army of skilled communicators with an eye toward visual presentation out there fighting on his behalf.

Hegseth and Duffy gave regular video updates after a deadly crash near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Vice President JD Vance represents the administration on both social media, where he is not afraid to engage in fights with political rivals, and cable news shows Trump himself described as “the enemy camp,” not just GOP-friendly outlets. 

Attorney General Pam Bondi has been a frequent cable news guest for years. So has Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who patrolled the troubled southern border on horseback and has, since her confirmation, been seen on-camera donning a cowboy hat. Tough-talking border czar Tom Homan gives regular televised warnings to any elected official who would try to thwart the deportations Trump has ordered. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has been an unflappable presence in the briefing room.

All this is happening without Trump ceding the spotlight much himself. He didn’t just tape a pregame interview ahead of the Super Bowl. He went to New Orleans to attend the game himself. (Former President Joe Biden declined the traditional interview last year and instead issued an anti-shrinkflation video, in effect blaming food companies for the high cost of voters’ football game spreads.)

Trump has been more available to reporters than Biden. He has given press conferences and answered questions from the Oval Office as he signs bills and executive actions. The exchanges aren’t always friendly, but they are generally less contentious than they were in 2017 — not least because many journalists felt starved for this kind of access during the Biden administration.

While Trump has always been a big presence who likes to flood the zone, at two important points last year, he stepped back from the media maelstrom. After the June 27 debate with Biden, universally viewed as a disaster for Democrats, Trump mostly allowed the fallout to proceed without his commentary. He did not step on the headlines about Biden’s age, electability, and fitness to continue serving. 

After beating the Democrats’ replacement candidate, former Vice President Kamala Harris, in November, Trump retreated from public view to Mar-a-Lago to plot his transition. There was still a flurry of statements and announcements of new appointments. He also made strategic public appearances as Biden and Harris began to recede from view. But Trump spent a decent chunk of those weeks presenting himself as a workhorse rather than a showhorse. 

This approach appeared to pay off in the polls. Gallup found in December that 51% approved of Trump’s handling of the transition compared to 44% who disapproved, the exact opposite of where things stood in January 2017. A CNN poll around the same time found 55% approved. A CBS News-YouGov poll in November recorded a 59% approval rating for the Trump transition.

Some political analysts concluded Trump was more popular when he was less ubiquitous. The retrospective approval ratings of his first term had generally been higher than his poll numbers were at the time throughout the 2024 campaign, though that probably had at least as much to do with comparisons with Biden as Trump’s media exposure. Democrats erroneously believed Trump’s high profile ahead of Election Day, especially his Madison Square Garden rally, would cost him the election.

In the days before Trump took the oath of office, however, he and his Cabinet of communicators were back out in front again. There has been no sense of stopping since. From the row over H-1B visas to the talk of acquiring Greenland and reacquiring the Panama Canal to mass deportations to the Jan. 6 pardons to Elon Musk’s cost-cutting crusade at the Department of Government Efficiency to Trump’s Gaza musings, it has been an administration of a thousand news cycles.

This was true during the first term as well. But while it is every bit as exhausting for the Washington press corps to try to cover, the second episode of the Trump administration feels like it has much higher production value. The chaos is more deliberate and by design than simply a byproduct of a mercurial chief executive and a ragtag band of advisers vying for his attention and sympathy. There is considerably less leaking, and whatever infighting exists has been mostly kept under wraps.

A set of telegenic Cabinet nominees delivered in at least one big spot where their skills could be counted on: televised confirmation hearings. Hegseth likely saved his embattled nomination, which seemed destined to go the way of John Tower under George H.W. Bush, with a full-court press in front of the cameras. FBI director nominee Kash Patel clashed with Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), which went viral online. Time and again, the Trump picks pushed back against Democratic grandstanding, secure in the knowledge that their real target audience was Republicans.

Whenever Trump has been on the ropes politically, the speculation has been that his real goal was to build Trump TV. When his first presidential campaign was initially treated as a joke, the smart set in Washington speculated that it was a branding exercise — as if the Trump brand was somehow obscure before he started running for office — to get him into political television. Surely, he knew he couldn’t beat Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton!

Four years later, this talk reemerged as Trump trailed in his reelection bid. He was frustrated by how he was covered by the existing cable news channels, even conservative-leaning ones. It made sense to have a Trump-aligned network, and his brand was now almost wholly political rather than associated with gaudy displays of wealth and confident business acumen. Once again, political observers began to wonder what Trump TV would look like.

“Above all, it would be unwavering in its devotion to Trump,” Robyn Autry, a sociology professor at Wesleyan University, wrote in an op-ed for NBC News at the time. “That is, it would be Trump.”

But there have been two striking things about the past few weeks. One is that you can have Trump TV and the presidency too. Indeed, dominating and powering through every news cycle is essential to Trump’s continued political success. A second development is even more surprising: This iteration is big enough to leave room for other stars of the show besides Trump himself.

The most obvious is Vance, whose skillset is different from but complementary to Trump’s. He is wonkier and more aw-shucks polite, but the vice president can go in for the kill when he needs to. “I really don’t care, Margaret,” Vance’s moneyline in a contentious CBS News interview, already belongs in the annals of a half-century of Republican pushback against the national media.

Musk is probably the least TV-friendly of Trump’s deputies and also the one whose quasi-celebrity status most predates his association with the president. But he now receives wall-to-wall media coverage. Musk is now an even bigger villain in the liberal narrative than Trump himself. Like the president, Musk’s posts on X — a social media platform he bought, saying he wanted to rid it of left-wing bias — are practically viewed as government policy. Democrats try to portray him as the unelected power behind the throne, an attack line perhaps necessitated by the fact Trump won the popular vote last year.

Even characters who have been written out of the show have demonstrated more staying power than Anthony Scaramucci. Vivek Ramaswamy may have overreached in his social commentary about American workers and fell victim to the first big Trumpworld feud to play out publicly in the second term. But Ramaswamy is still a major presence in the media as a conservative voice and can, with a straight face, launch a bid for governor of Ohio next year.

If Trump is jealous of the attention any of his underlings has received, it has yet to become obvious. And by all appearances, this remains very much his show.

We will have to see how long the public’s attention to this successful reboot can maintain itself. Voters were tired of Trump’s act during the first term and turned to Biden for normalcy. Instead, they got a border crisis, rampant inflation, and a seat uncomfortably close to multiple foreign wars. After that, Trump no longer seemed so bad.

By the midterm elections, perhaps voters will be ready to change the channel again. Until then, don’t touch that dial.

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.