The Media and Trump: A Policy Feedback Loop
Coverage fuels his strategy, and the public stays in the audience.
COMMENTARY—The great American stage has once again lit up, curtains drawn on a new term of the Trump administration. But this ain’t your grandfather’s presidential production. No, sir. This one stomps and swaggers, improvises, forgets its lines, rewrites the script mid-show, and leaves the audience both aghast and applauding. And if you listen close enough, you can almost hear the old ghosts of policy past muttering, “Well, I’ll be.”
It’s clear that this administration came in with a conception—no, a conviction—of how to handle immigration. Not a vague idea floating in the ether, but a blueprint inked in the bold Sharpie strokes we’ve come to expect from the man in the golden tower. Raids? Check. Visa crackdowns? Check. Deportation highways with fewer speed limits? Triple check. All vintage Trump. But this time, he’s refined the formula.
Unlike previous presidents, who approached immigration with the gloved hands of bureaucratic subtlety and veiled language, President Trump treats it like a business transaction. He rolls out the product—be it a ban, a directive, or a barbed tweet—then lets the market (read: the media) respond. Based on that reaction, he tweaks, refines, and rebrands. In a twisted turn of fate, the press has become his product testing lab. And business, as they say, is booming.
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Take the would-be travel ban of March 21. Following his executive order on January 20 calling for a 60-day reassessment of immigration standards, there was talk—loud, panicked, and widespread—of a fresh list of banned nations. But lo and behold, that list never surfaced. Why? Because the media had already hollered the rafters down with scrutiny, skepticism, and speculation. Trump, ever the dealmaker, sidestepped. Instead, he offered a foggy announcement: further vetting, more review, pause the process.
But let’s not be fooled by the smokescreen. In that moment, he effectively enacted a temporary ban. No fireworks. No headlines screaming “Muslim Ban 2.0.” Just a vague press release and a quiet rollback of asylum processes. It was the same policy with a new coat of paint, slipped in while the press was still wiping ink off their first drafts.
And the dance repeats. Directive. Outrage. Retraction. Reinvention. Then back again, slicker, stronger, and less assailable. It’s a method that’s half trial balloon, half magic trick, and wholly Trump.
In the halcyon days of yesteryear, presidents drafted policy in the backrooms of bureaucratic Babel. Words like “executive discretion” and “temporary enforcement priority realignment” were tucked away in footnotes, meant for scholars and sleepy-eyed staffers. The press, underfunded and understaffed, often missed the meat beneath the jargon.
But in this new carnival of governance, everything is center stage. The media, hungry for headlines and dollars, feeds on every tweet, every press conference fumble, every legal scuffle. And Trump knows it. He’s turned the Fourth Estate into a policy brainstorming session. He throws out the bait, watches the response, and adjusts accordingly.
It’s governance by focus group—except the focus group is cable news, Twitter, and the Sunday morning talking heads.
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Critics will say this is madness. They’re not wrong. But buried within the madness is a shrewd machinery. The administration has learned from the bruises of its first term. It no longer stumbles into controversy—it charges, watches, adapts. And in doing so, it weaponizes outrage as an apparatus of control.
Democrats, meanwhile, are left scribbling on whiteboards, wondering why half the country doesn’t hear them anymore. The answer may lie not in policy but in perception. Somewhere along the road, the party of empathy lost its ear. Voters felt unheard, unseen—more statistic than citizen. And the media? Perhaps it needs to take a long look in its own mirror, where the ghost of P.T. Barnum smirks back. In the pursuit of clicks and coverage, we may have become complicit performers in Trump’s traveling circus.
Now, none of this excuses the harshness of the policy. Immigration under this administration is still a hard-edged affair. Families remain separated. Lives are upended. The constitutionality of many actions remains tangled in courtroom limbo. But the subtle brutality of past administrations—those slow-grinding gears of deportation masked in soft language—no longer hides behind closed doors.
And perhaps that’s the real shift. With Trump, the ugliness is out in the open. There’s no velvet glove—just the fist. And while that terrifies many, it also forces a conversation the country has long avoided.
In the end, this may be the tragic genius of it all. Trump provokes the media. The media reacts. Trump adapts. The public watches. Policy is shaped not in silence but in spectacle. And the man in the red tie, standing at the center ring, plays ringleader, choreographer, and act all at once.
Well, folks, they call it a clown show, and I’ll be the first to admit, I’m starting to wonder whether I’m the clown or if it’s Trump. At this point, I can't tell which one of us is the bigger fool. I should’ve figured it out long ago, but just when the time comes for me to put my brain to good use and figure something out that’s worth a lick, I do what I always do—I default to the old reliable, clockwork routine: decry Trump and everything he’s worth. Oh, I’m the virtuous one, alright. I’m the one who holds the pen, I’m the REPORTER.
Every time this country hits a rough patch—like the one we’re in right now—we’re handed a golden opportunity to reflect and maybe, just maybe, become better people. We ought to take a good long look at ourselves and ask how we ended up here, how we found ourselves electing folks who’d just as soon deport us, throw us in jail, or denounce our beliefs. How did we arrive at a place where even the very idea of what it means to be American is up for philosophical debate? We ought to wonder, because the rest of the world wonders too, and with a desperation that could sink a ship. They’re all scratching their heads, wondering how we got here. And truth be told, we should know the answer. But we don’t. We can’t. And like the true Americans we are, we lack the philosophical insight to answer the most pressing question about this country—ourselves. We carry on, convinced that somehow, it’ll all work itself out. Meanwhile, we hardly stop to think about how badly we’ve failed ourselves.
As someone who’s now a reporter, I find myself aghast at how few media outlets engage in this kind of self-reflection. It can’t do any better for the public than Trump can answer a critique without throwing a tantrum. It's a sad state of affairs when even countries far beyond our borders are forced to explain us to ourselves. We’ve become spoiled, willingly ignorant, bloated, selfish, and, frankly, corrupt. We're like the new Romans—decaying from the inside, unaware of the ugly ruin we've wrought. Whatever it is, Americans have fallen, and what that means, I’m not entirely sure.
In these shaky, unpredictable times, someone needs to stand up and be the voice of reason and self-reflection. This is the perfect moment to write a new book, to define a new age, to capture the madness of our current instability and reckless disregard. The Age of Dissonance, perhaps, is what it should be called. But who’s going to write it?