The author says Trump’s political gift is steering media with reversals, invented wins, and bait tweets; after Jan. 6 the press ignored him, then Biden-era inflation handed 2024 back. Second-term optics—ballroom, Kennedy Center name fight, a 250-foot DC arch, “Liberation Day” tariffs walked back days later, ICE spectacle, claimed historic hits on Houthis, Iran, and Maduro—are treated as legacy theater more than policy.

Voters, the piece argues, can live with delusion longer than workers or households can; Mamdani is cast as the left-side copy: a May video claiming NYC’s $12 billion gap was closed without service cuts, which the author calls mostly hoped-for taxes, delayed pensions, and a state bailout.

Reality still arrives: the February Iran war dragged on and tightened oil; affordability was never tackled at the root. Photoshopped “best president” lists, a Greenland deal sold as historic, press-pool bans, and an arch billed as a sniper/drone post are called distractions. Spectacle outlasts Trump, the author says, but so do the costs—and truth eventually catches both parties.

As a politician, Donald Trump has always been almost unmatched in his ability to direct and steer the media in ways that benefit him.

Throughout his first term, Trump was excellent at making sudden policy reversals and grand, out-of-the-blue announcements that would leave the legacy media scrambling to keep up and therefore keep news consumers from looking too closely at his actual actions for too long. He would completely make up accomplishments and great political victories and operate as if they were real. And he would frequently post purposefully provocative tweets that would take an overwhelmingly popular position and word it in the perfect way to generate a complete meltdown from progressive and establishment opponents.

With that last strategy especially, Trump was able to turn what was, on the surface, a profoundly negative relationship with the legacy press into a persistent political advantage. In truth, the media, which enjoyed a massive “Trump bump” in engagement and revenue, was incentivized to play along. At least until Trump’s fans did the “unthinkable” at the Capitol on January 6 and Trump was booted off social media.

As the Biden years began, the media did what they could have done from the beginning had they actually been as anti-Trump as they presented themselves in his first term: they ignored him.

The former president retreated to his resort in Florida, and both the media and politically-active public turned their attention to the Biden administration. However, that attention quickly turned into a major political disadvantage for Biden and the rest of the political establishment. There were several policy disasters that played out during the Biden years. But the biggest, or at least, most politically damaging one, was the historic surge in price inflation that hit a little over a year into Biden’s presidency—the delayed but unavoidable consequence of the trillions of dollars the government printed and injected straight into the economy during the pandemic.

More so than........

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