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Perspective | The century-old roots of Donald Trump’s

reality-show presidency
David J. Shorten
January 31 washingtonpost.com

The century-old roots of Donald Trump’s reality-show presidency

Trump is manipulating a 20th-century bureaucracy to carry out his 21st-century spin campaign.

by David J. Shorten
Made by History
Perspective

Perspective Discussion of news topics with a point of view, including narratives by individuals regarding
their own experiences

Follow @DShorten88
David J. Shorten is a history PhD Candidate at Boston University.

When President Trump took office one year ago,

pundits wondered how he would fare as the first
reality TV president. Would he suddenly attain the
necessary “presidential” qualities he never
displayed during the campaign — namely
leadership, diplomacy and attention to
policymaking?

A year in, that pivot has yet to happen. Indeed,

Michael Wolff’s salacious bestseller “Fire and Fury”
President Trump arrives for a ‘Make America Great Again’ rally at the confirms what many have suspected about the
Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville on March 20, 2017. Trump White House: it is a media circus focused on
President Trump’s presidency resembles a reality TV show. (Jim television ratings rather than policy. The atmosphere
Watson/AFP)
is chaotic, filled with White House staffers bitterly
fighting for control of the administration’s agenda. In a real sense Trump is the star of his own reality TV
show presidency — a 24-hour flawed-character melodrama that generates endless controversy and little
policy vision.

Wolff attributes the frequent infighting, crossed messaging and firings to Trump’s narcissistic personality
and inability to govern. But by making his battle with the media his governing strategy, the president is also
using administrative chaos to his advantage. In fact, Trump is manipulating a deeply entrenched public
relations operation that long ago embedded itself into the White House bureaucracy.

In the early 20th century, as presidents expanded their administrative authority, they projected an image of
themselves as public policy leaders. A White House bureaucracy that courted media coverage, created
new presidential norms and framed the president as a public-policy decider became central to this goal.

Trump relies on the same infrastructure, but he has inverted those aims. By attacking the media and
divorcing himself from his administration’s attempts to form a coherent agenda, Trump has liberated
himself from the responsibility of governing consistently or productively, focusing instead on

accusation-hurling,
Page 1 of 3 shameless self-aggrandizement and garnering publicity for its own sake.
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accusation-hurling, shameless self-aggrandizement and garnering publicity for its own sake. And yet this
approach serves this president’s end goals (and those of all reality-show savants): allaying blame, accruing
fame and staying in the game.

The White House bureaucracy has always adapted to the governing style of the sitting president, and the
media-president relationship has always been central to its development.

At the turn of the past century, before the modern media presidency took shape, presidents typically hired
one secretary and only a handful of assistants. Newspapers did not have dedicated presidential
correspondents, access to the executive mansion grounds (which Theodore Roosevelt rebranded “the
White House” in 1901) or even permission to quote the president directly. Instead, the nation’s two major
political parties organized politics at every level of government, and party “bosses” maintained rigid
discipline over voters and politicians alike, including the president — a level of control Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) could only dream of today.

Then, at the turn of the century, Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt cultivated a
relationship with the media to paint their expansion of executive authority as presidential.

McKinley created the first executive mansion press room in 1897 to promote his administration’s policy
aims. He also empowered his secretary, George B. Cortelyou, to speak on his behalf. Cortelyou managed
an expanded staff of 30 assistants, drafted press statements and held regular press briefings. In effect, he
systematized the press-president relationship by serving as both press secretary and chief of staff before
either position formally existed. These efforts helped McKinley sell his administration’s acquisition of
Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.

This image management worked more broadly as well. Fawned over in the press for his back-of-the-train
speechmaking, and benefiting from newspaper coverage that relied on Cortelyou’s press briefings,
McKinley helped Republicans unexpectedly retain control over both houses of Congress in 1898 before
his reelection in 1900. Those results convinced his successor that Americans now expected — or at least
tolerated — strong executive leadership.

Theodore Roosevelt cemented a more direct relationship between the press and the president, even as the
relationship flipped from being cooperative to combative at times. Unlike McKinley, Roosevelt did not feel
compelled to rely on his secretary to communicate his administration’s agenda to the public. He preferred
to control his own relationship with the press — proving that presidents could effectively serve as their own
press secretaries.

Roosevelt also realized that he could use the powers of his office to defend his reputation more
directly. Although he did not go so far as to label the press “the enemy of the American people” as Trump
tweeted back in February, Roosevelt did attempt to curtail press freedom in other ways. He ordered
publishers to reassign journalists who depicted him unfavorably, warned his staff to avoid leaks to the
press and in 1909 asked the Justice Department to sue newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer for libel.

When, in 1904, the cover of Puck magazine criticized the president by depicting him crowning himself
emperor along with the caption “L’état, C’est Moi” (“I am the state”), it signaled the extent to which
Americans linked the president’s persona with his vastly expanded power over the federal government. By
shaping press coverage to create an image of themselves as the decision-maker, McKinley and Roosevelt
demonstrated that presidents could expand their power by manipulating the press.

However, as the White House bureaucracy continued to grow throughout the 20th century, it progressively
distanced presidents from framing their own agendas.
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In the 1920s, presidents introduced professional speechwriters for the first time, to meet the demands of a
schedule filled with public engagements in person, on radio and in film. Then, with the emergence of the
vastly expanded “New Deal” state during the Great Depression, the White House began employing even
more press, policy and administrative specialists, as the president became the figurehead of a much larger
policymaking operation. By 1936, the White House employed more than 150 publicists alone.

Despite steady growth, the White House bureaucracy remained as adaptable as ever. Presidents
continued to create staff positions to meet public relations challenges, but those roles remained subject to
the president’s image-making. Even so, not until 2017 did a president realize that, even if the bureaucracy
did not conform to the administration’s professed aims, it would nonetheless continue to shield the
president from bad press.

Trump uses both of these features of the White House bureaucracy — its ability to set policy independently
of the president and its continued flexibility — to surround himself with an army of staff who act as human
shields. He invented entirely new senior positions for Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House “chief
strategist,” and Jared Kushner, “assistant to the president and senior adviser” (later shortened to “senior
adviser to the president”). These ambiguous roles obfuscate who controls the administration’s agenda and
distance the president from responsibility when he advocates untenable policy positions. And they allow
Trump to dispose of staff as a way of dealing with the controversy he creates. As Michael Wolff quoted
Trump revealingly, the president believes his political troubles are “just problems about the team.”

This administrative strategy has also given the current president surprising power to throw a wrench into
policy negotiations whenever it strikes him to do so, such as when he recently vetoed the bipartisan
compromise to tie the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and border security into a
government spending bill to avoid a shutdown. “As soon as we figure out what [Trump] is for, then I would
be convinced that we were not just spinning our wheels,” McConnell stated flatly in response to the
president suddenly injecting himself into congressional negotiations.

Since the early 20th century, presidents have (literally) managed their way out of public relations
challenges. But the Trump presidency has simultaneously flipped this function on its head, demonstrating
how White House staff can be used to avoid the thankless task of actually governing while still surviving
politically. What is Trump’s agenda here? Not “deconstructing the administrative state,” as Bannon used to
imagine, but rather, just saving his own skin.

Trump, the consummate reality TV star, has discovered that the White House is tailor-made to carry out his
agenda. For as long as he remains there, staffers will step into the line of fire to spin whatever outrageous
statements he feels compelled to make. He will continue to dominate the news cycle while being protected
by a bureaucracy that presidents designed to shape their public images, not to uphold the truth.

David J. Shorten is a history PhD Candidate at Boston University.

Follow @DShorten88

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