The New Yorker:

During the President’s second term, he and his staff have made the media briefing his signature rhetorical form.

By Vinson Cunningham

On January 3rd, in Palm Beach, Florida, Donald Trump stood behind the lectern at a press conference, to regale members of the media about the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan President. Tan and hoarse, sloshing his syllables together imprecisely, Trump looked and sounded like someone who’d rushed away from a sedate moment of his vacation to take a work call. He gave a short speech about the operation in Caracas, sometimes looking up from his prepared text to offer seemingly impromptu annotations: “It was an assault like people have not seen since”—here he took a pause, searching the air for an apt point of reference—“World War Two.” The military officers’ work there and in other recent actions was “all perfectly executed and done.”

You could tell that Trump found the mission just plain cool. “It was dark,” he said, narrating the adventure. “The lights of Caracas were largely turned off, due to a certain expertise that we have.” What expertise? He didn’t say. Conveying helpful information wasn’t really his aim. The point was to project his own power and, perhaps, to inspire in his listeners a pang of jealousy at his great big chest of war toys.

The Trump Administration, seizing upon the opportunity of untrammelled time to brag and hold attention and boldly reframe and bend the truth, has made the press conference its signature rhetorical form. Even more than in Trump’s famously long, digressive, “weaving” rally speeches, he and his spokespeople have used the formerly staid tradition of speaking to and taking questions from the media to set forth their distorted vision of the future—and, maybe more subtly, to let slip their estimation of the public. Throughout January, the members of the Trump regime welcomed the New Year by blitzing the podium: they took the chaos they’d created—the sudden power vacuum in Venezuela, the fatal incursions of ICE in Minnesota, a spun-up territorial crisis over Greenland—and tried to wrestle it into the shape of a story in which they would prevail.

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