Daniel Béland

August 3, 2025

Given the four-year preview of his first term, it should come as no surprise that even in the middle of summer, we can’t escape Donald Trump.

Through ongoing executive orders, public announcements, press conferences, social media posts and shifting deadlines of tariffs, we are bombarded hourly by the former reality-show host’s presidential stylings. The difference in this term seems to be that Trump is devoting as much performative energy to provoking attacks as to attacking. As John R. MacArthur of Harper’s puts it, “He delights in being attacked because it keeps him at center stage.”

Trump’s use of the world’s most reliable coverage-magnet bully pulpit as a propaganda tool is not simply the product of personality. In fact, what media scholar Nolan Higdon calls the “spectacle presidency” is largely about controlling the political agenda to emphasize certain issues and obscure others, when diversion is politically expedient.

For instance, as the debate over the possible release of the Jeffrey Epstein files continues, the president seeks to shift media and public attention elsewhere, from ever-changing tariff deadlines to grossly false accusations about people his base loves to hate such as Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama.

But the stakes of this spectacle are much higher than personal score settling, reflecting the deepening crisis of US democracy and the rise of American authoritarian tendencies rationalized by Trump. This explains why it’s especially hard to disconnect from politics this summer, as the shadow of Trump looms large, in the United States, in Canada and in the other countries he targets on a regular basis.

In his second term, Trump’s tactical use of the presidency’s coverage imperatives has been compounded by the chaos of ever-moving deadlines — notably on tariffs and peace negotiations.

Because Trump’s deadlines have now been established as subject to change, parties — including Canada — on the receiving end of his threats or sitting at the negotiation table with his administration constantly worry about any new presidential statement featured in a speech, an impromptu press conference, or a social media post sent at anytime of the day or night. In other words, his unpredictability and volatility force people to pay attention. You can’t have a spectacle without an audience. Threatening people, including members of Congress from his own party, makes him more powerful politically by sowing fear that anyone could be next.

This is also at least partly why, on a regular basis, President Trump “likes to make examples of countries, killing chickens to scare the monkeys, as the Chinese like to say,” per Foreign Policy in Focus Director John Feffer. For example, in late January “he brought out the big guns to threaten Colombia if it didn’t accept returned deportees,” writes Feffer. “There was no formal diplomatic process. The entire episode was conducted on social media, Trump’s preferred mode of discourse.”

This is also why Trump regularly trolls Canada in the context of ongoing trade negotiations, as it allows him to draw attention to his arbitrary power while fuelling uncertainty about outcomes: it is an abuse of asymmetrical power, even as opponents have jokingly depicted his tendency to discard previously uttered threats as a proof that Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO).

In his second term, Trump’s tactical use of the presidency’s coverage imperatives has been compounded by the chaos of ever-moving deadlines — notably on tariffs and peace negotiations.

What is certain is that President Trump has become a master of what U.S. agenda-setting setting scholars Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner call The Politics of Attention. According to Jones and Baumgartner, policymakers are bombarded with information and the processes through which they can curate their priories is deeply political in nature while involving many actors and institutions, including the mass media.

In a content sphere overcrowded with information and a complex polyphony of media and social media voices, the president’s strategy seems to be to overwhelm his domestic opponents and world leaders with a firehose of in-your-face threats and statements that allows him to force as many people as possible to watch his spectacle presidency.

In this task, he is assisted by high-profile members of his administration such as Vice President J.D. Vance but also by journalists and social media commentators, both supporters and opponents of the White House, who cannot stop reporting and commenting on this perpetual onslaught of blunt and provocative discourse.

Although these trends were incipient during the first Trump presidency, the beginning of his second (non-consecutive) term features a president even more volatile and relentless than before, which was obvious from the outset of Trump 2.0, including via his tariff threats against Canada before November 2024 was out.

While it is tempting to exclusively attribute this situation to Trump’s personality, broader factors related to a changing historical and institutional context, including and especially the behavior of other political actors, have enabled this situation. In other words, what we are seeing now is largely the product of collective forces that have empowered President Trump even more than during his first term.

These elements include the current crisis of the Democratic Party which, according to The Wall Street Journal, is unfavorably viewed by 63% of US voters, its lowest score since 1990. Clearly, Democrats have been struggling since the shocking defeat of Kamala Harris in 2024, and are searching for a new voice and strategy with which to effectively oppose Trump.

At the same time, most Republicans in Congress seem cowed by the president, who doesn’t hesitate to attack people from his own party who dare challenge him or vote against his legislative agenda, something we saw recently during the debate over the enactment of the Big Beautiful Bill Act. Trump’s GOP bullying is enabled by the perpetual threat to moderates of being “primaried” out of their elections by the activist MAGA base, a political cudgel that inhibits dissent and makes all the braver those who do challenge him.

Finally, in sharp contrast to what we saw during his first term, President Trump is surrounded by unqualified executive appointees who were nominated by him because of their personal loyalty and not for their expertise and capacity to provide advice he might not like. In fact, as writer and former Democratic advisor Sidney Blumenthal pointed out, before day one, he “decided to empower some of the most fringe characters floating around his Maga movement. The outrageousness of his nominees is intended above all to force the subjugation of those remaining Republicans who insist on their independence.” Barely eight months later, it is clear that Blumenthal was right and that his supporting cast has only enhanced Trump’s capacity to shape the politics of attention during his second term.

For the many people who are angered and alarmed by the president’s policies and rhetoric, his domination of the public stage is a source of psychological stress. “Trump anxiety” is real, say the experts, and it is partly the intended product of a spectacle presidency whose underlying institutional failures may be hard to reverse.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director (on leave) of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University. He has published several books about U.S politics and public policy, including Obamacare Wars (with Philip Rocco and Alex Waddan).