Ugly showdown or lovefest, Trump is all about the message

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“This is going to make great television, I will say that.” Those were the final words spoken by Donald Trump to the somewhat shell-shocked media dispersing from the Oval Office on Friday, after his bust-up with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

It was a telling moment. For Trump, everything is about how things look on Trump TV, where he imagines himself as the grand and awe-inspiring star. When he’s playing the part of the gracious, benevolent president — a mode that he seemed to still be in at the start of that press conference — he likes to keep things, as he might put it, very classy, very elegant. Everything is “beautiful”; every world leader, hero or villain, is a “great guy” who he has a “very good relationship” with.

When he decides it’s time to play the tough guy, though, he can instantaneously switch into a different gear: boorish, brutish, imperious. This version of Trump might be one that greatly damages his country’s standing in the world. It might be Russian propaganda. But, regardless, he remains a master at getting across his message. Over on the other side of Trump’s “beautiful ocean” on Friday night, the angry showdown in the White House was all people wanted to talk about.

My cab driver said he didn’t know how the war in Ukraine had started but had been following the evening’s drama on LBC. “Zelenskyy needs to accept a ceasefire, that’s what Trump says,” he told me. “But Zelenskyy doesn’t want to do it.” I was struck by the way that, while this man was listening to a show in which the row was being analysed ad nauseam by all sorts of pundits, it was Trump’s message that was really cutting through.

Over the past week, we have seen two very different sides to Trump’s communication style. He might have been roundly mocked last year for suggesting that his veering off-topic is actually a brilliant practice he calls the “weave”, but to watch the US president speak alongside British prime minister Keir Starmer at the White House was to watch a man in full control. The press conference contained all the hallmarks of the communication style that Trump does very well when he is not angry: compliments, humour, informality, simplicity, authenticity, evasion, denial.

“Did I say that?” Trump replied when asked whether he still believed that Zelenskyy was a “dictator”, as he wrote on social media last week. “I can’t believe I said that. Next question.” Trump gave a knowing smile as the journalists gathered in the Oval Office let out a kind of collective laughing groan.

This was classic Trump cunning: to his devoted followers, his non-denial denial was a signal he would probably stick to this line in private but that he was happy to play along in front of the media and British prime minister. To those who had been alarmed by Trump’s words, this was a reassurance (albeit a very fleeting one) that perhaps he hadn’t really meant it after all.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage recently reminded us that “you should always take Trump seriously, but not necessarily always take him literally”. He might be right, but there is a problem: how is one to know when we should take the president literally? It’s impossible to really know, and that’s the beauty of this technique: Trump leaves things so open to interpretation, changes his words so often, and offers so many compliments along with his insults, that he manages to maintain plausible deniability, keeping his options open.

It’s not just Trump who is so effective at delivering his message; it’s his team, too. Take press secretary Karoline Leavitt. The 27-year-old — the youngest person to be given this job — has an impressive command of the briefing room and takes absolutely no prisoners. Last week she laid into the “hounds in the media” for being “obsessed” with who the new head of Elon Musk’s so-called Doge department would be. From glamorous lawyers to former-Fox-News-host cabinet members, Trump is surrounded by telegenic, forceful, communicators.

He also has stamina. At Thursday’s press conference, vice-president JD Vance leaned over to Starmer. “He’s answered 1,009 questions in the first 30 days”, he could be heard saying proudly, citing a report by the National Journal that found Trump had answered seven times as many questions as Biden in the same period.

Trump is “flooding the zone” and at the moment nobody in America seems able to stop him. If the Democrats have an alternative to what is being put forward by the president and his insolent young pretender, Vance, they really need to start communicating it — fast. Scoffing and scolding are not going to cut it. Trump TV is the real world now.

jemima.kelly@ft.com