Much of the establishment media has spent a decade obsessing over Donald J. Trump. From sly mocking when he first announced his candidacy to outright pearl-clutching as he made one of the most incredible political comebacks in modern history in 2024, the nation’s news networks have never had a better friend in terms of ensuring their audience keeps coming back for more. Since the huge Republican defeat last week, one might assume that the Trump Show would be winding up; after all, he is now officially a “lame-duck” president. But that appears not to be the case. And the press, in this instance, could have a point.
Dominating the Headlines
With the midterm elections in the rearview mirror and a newly emboldened Democratic Party looking set to take the reins of power, there really should be a whole lot to write and talk about. For example, what’s the legislative agenda? How will Democrats deal with a “veto president”? How might the Republican Party rebuild? Any number of stories with angles galore are in need of deep analysis. And yet, what do we see on the digital front pages of the most significant press outlets? Donald Trump, again, and again, and again.
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Let’s take CNN’s politics page, for example. Above the digital fold (on Nov. 11), 50% of its stories were directly about the president. The same goes for DC’s most prominent newspaper; its digital edition politics page had nine stories out of 20 on Trump (45%). MS NOW goes a little lighter, with just 35% of the articles above the digital fold having Trump’s name in the title – however, several pieces in that section were about the president without mentioning him by name.
And we see this pattern, this near obsession, across the media landscape.
Good Reason for the Trump Smorgasbord?
Certainly, come Jan. 3, 2027, most eyes will be on the newly empowered Democrats to see what they do in Congress. But the smart money suggests their efforts will amount to little more than theatrics because Trump is still the president, lame duck or otherwise. And he has two years to craft the legacy he wants.
Presidents often turn to foreign policy during their second term, especially once their party (almost) invariably loses power in Congress. In world affairs, they can become a grand touring elder statesman, quietly delivering their accumulated wisdom to favored institutions, or they can become a political dynamo attempting to shake up the global order. Time and again, Trump has shown his willingness to do the latter. Now that he has no further elections to consider, one might wonder just how “unleashed” he is likely to be.
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Trump could well be on track to more than double the number of executive orders issued by any other president in the last 50 years. While Barack Obama famously boasted of his pen and phone, his biggest late-term moves came abroad: normalizing relations with Cuba, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Paris climate agreement. And what of Ronald Reagan, who signed the INF Treaty, an arms control agreement, with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, a year after Republicans lost the Senate? Or George W. Bush? He ordered the Iraq surge in January 2007, right after the 2006 midterm losses. Foreign policy is where lame-duck presidents tend to go.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio just returned from a G7 foreign ministers’ confab. Trump has openly said he would “do it again” on Iran (and appears determined to wrangle a clear win from the situation). And Ukraine seems to be coming back to his orbit. All signs seem to point to an unshackled President Trump making the world his political playground.
It looks like the media’s obsession with the 47th president is, for once, quite justified.
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