The moment, coming hours after King Abdullah II of Jordan and Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah departed from the White House Tuesday, caught the media off guard.

The White House had not originally announced that Musk would attend the executive order signing until a pool report sent the message to reporters. The stunt garnered breaking news chyrons from several broadcast outlets and gave Trump what he tends to crave most: press attention.

“FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE,” White House communications director Steven Cheung posted in the aftermath.

Trump pushed for Musk to speak and take questions from the press about his work with DOGE, a controversial agency that has received praise from Republicans, protests from Democrats, and some legal pauses from federal judges.

“It’s called transparency,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) told the Washington Examiner about Trump’s efforts to use executive orders for media attention. “It’s giving you everything you’ve ever asked for and being truthful and honest and transparent and public about it. It’s great.”

Musk’s appearance at the White House is just another instance of how Trump has transformed routine executive order signings into moments to draw more attention to his administration.

The effect is meant to signal to the public that the low-profile days of the Biden administration are out. The swashbuckling Trump administration is in.

“After four years of being governed by the anonymous staffers running the rudderless ship that was the Biden administration, Americans are once again getting used to having a president who is transparent and who leads from the front,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai. “That includes President Trump’s Cabinet officials and nominees who are helping him deliver on an America First agenda while keeping the American people informed.”

Trump aims for media dominance

Mere hours after he was sworn into office, Trump headed to Capital One Arena in downtown Washington, D.C., where thousands of adoring supporters waited for him to sign the first round of executive orders he would unleash upon the nation.

“I’ll revoke nearly 80 destructive and radical executive actions of the previous administration, one of the worst administrations in history,” Trump said as the crowd, who weren’t able to attend the inauguration at the U.S. Capitol, cheered him on throughout the multiple order signings.

The adulation from the crowd was the first sign that Trump intended to make a public spectacle of his executive actions.

More than two weeks later, at the White House, Trump signed an executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports. This time, a crowd of schoolgirls in sports uniforms and adult women applauded and thanked him for ending “the war on women’s sports.”

“Now you’re gonna go out and win those events,” Trump told a young girl standing by him.

The moment was another example of Trump using an executive order to achieve cultural dominance and directly suggest through visual images that the GOP was the party of women.

“The president, whoever he or she is at any given moment, is the news-maker in chief. So if the president does something, it’s new. When he goes into the Oval Office and announces that he’s signing these things and holds up the thing, that is basically a made for television, made for cameras, sort of moment,” said Christopher Galdieri, a political scientist at Saint Anselm College.

“And I think that plays into Trump’s view of political power, which is something that plays out in the public eye,” he continued. “He likes the signing. He doesn’t like the back-and-forth over what’s going to be in the document. He likes the press conference with the foreign leader. He’s indifferent to the months of negotiations between both countries that usually precede something like that.”

Trump signed at least 64 executive orders during the first weeks of his second administration, compared to former President Joe Biden, who signed 162 orders in four years of office. Former President Barack Obama signed 147 orders during his first term and 129 orders during his second term.

During Trump’s first term in office, he signed 220 orders, more than any other single four-year term of a president since Jimmy Carter, who signed 320 orders in his one term in the White House.

A recent CBS News-YouGov poll showed that 69% of participants viewed Trump as “tough,” 63% viewed him as “energetic,” 60% viewed him as “focused,” and 58% viewed him as “effective.”

Even the appearance of Musk at the Oval Office is meant to signal Trump’s display of dominance over his administration and nation, one expert said.

“What he seems to want to do is flagrantly demonstrate his power, his authority and his control, his dominance over Congress, his dominance over the bureaucracy, or the federal workforce,” said Tom Hollihan, a University of Southern California professor who studies political campaign communication. “He wanted to demonstrate his dominance over Musk. Time [magazine] had put Musk at the resolute desk. So, in that interview, Trump is at the resolute desk, and Musk is standing at his side making his case. So, I think it’s all about a demonstration of Trump’s authority and power.”

Legal challenges to Trump’s orders

Of the 63 legal challenges the Trump administration faces over executive actions, at least 14 pertain to Musk’s work through DOGE, according to Just Security.

Federal judges have either blocked or temporarily paused the president’s orders on birthright citizenship, DOGE’s access to sensitive records, and a federal funding freeze on grants.

But Trump scored a legal win last week after a federal judge allowed the deferred resignation offer for federal workers to continue and another federal judge clarified that Trump has some authority to pause federal spending provided it complies with existing statutes and regulations.

These rulings could result in a showdown, with the Supreme Court weighing in on how much power Trump will have over the judicial branch.

Trump said, “I always abide by the courts,” on Tuesday when asked about the court rulings blocking his orders. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went after judges who have interfered with Trump’s actions.

“The real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges in liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump’s basic executive authority,” Leavitt said during Wednesday’s briefing.

Leavitt added that although the administration will comply with federal rulings, “we will also continue to seek every legal remedy to ultimately overturn these radical injunctions and ensure President Trump’s policies can be enacted.”

The rulings have not slowed Trump down from attempting to bulldoze his executive actions into power or instill fear among the federal workforce as it navigates the president’s orders.

“There is some evidence suggesting that people believe what you say you’re going to do and are less concerned necessarily with what you do do,” said Jacob Neiheisel, an expert on political communication and campaigns at the University at Buffalo.

“If you create the perception that you’re very active, you’re doing something, even if you know the courts stop up much of the agenda, which seems likely outside of the areas in which the enumerated powers of the office are pretty clear, I think it still creates this perception that they are being very, very active and that they’re trying to do everything that they said they were going to do very quickly,” Neiheisel added.

A warning sign for the Trump administration

Trump is riding high approval ratings at the beginning of his second administration, but experts cautioned against overreliance on public spectacle over easing economic concerns.

Galdieri pointed to Trump’s press conferences during the COVID-19 pandemic that did little to assuage public panic and ultimately led to his presidential defeat in 2020.

“If you start to see an economic slowdown, if you start to see inflation hit the same sort of levels it was at in 2021, if gas prices go up, I mean, these are the things, as we’ve seen, bring down presidencies,” he said.

The University of Southern California, where Holihan teaches, is not admitting doctoral students during the peak period after the Trump administration attempted to cut medical research funding through the National Institutes of Health.

Some Republican lawmakers whose states could be hard hit by the cut to medical research funding are diplomatically urging Trump to reconsider. Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) called for a “targeted approach” to cuts in an attempt to save major universities in Alabama from losing billions in research funding.

A federal judge blocked the administration from pausing the plan to cut funding, but even if some of Trump’s executive orders are permanently overturned, the president will still have created some long-lasting damage.

“He’s making cuts with a blowtorch rather than a scalpel, and it’s certainly going to leave scars,” Holihan said.

Also adding to a possible future problem are Musk’s attention-seeking habits.

Any backlash to Musk’s work with the Department of Government Efficiency to slash federal spending and trim the federal workplace could possibly threaten his relationship with Trump if it upstages the president.

Musk met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi before the foreign leader met with Trump at the White House on Thursday, an example of the billionaire tech grabbing headlines.

Trump’s Cabinet members will likely need to walk a fine line between using their broadcast skills to dominate the airwaves and social media platforms without overshadowing Trump.

“The secretaries, they want to project kind of images of strength and MAGA rebelliousness and that they’re dismantling the deep state. They’re destroying a woke culture,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “And yet they’ve got to make sure not to overstep and crowd out Trump himself, and that I think is maybe one of the risks that we’re seeing with Musk right now. … Musk gets so much attention, he goes so kind of off the rails and starts doing a lot of damage.”