Nearly 18 months after leaving office and with his trademark Twitter account still suspended, former President Donald Trump continues to crop up in the news.
With incumbent President Joe Biden shying from the spotlight and struggling to get his messages to resonate, Trump commands a media presence much larger than that of a typical ex-president. With Jan. 6 committee hearings scheduled for prime time this month, the public will get an even larger dose of the Trump show than usual.
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“Trump is still the most interesting man in the world,” said Republican strategist John Feehery. “That’s why the media spends so much time covering him — because it is good for ratings.”
That statement is borne out by statistics showing that news television and website traffic plummeted after Biden took office last Jan. 20 and remains down overall.
But it’s not just the news media. Democrats continue referencing and talking about Trump, either in an attempt to connect down-ballot Republican candidates to him or to keep his misdeeds in office top of mind.
Historian David Garrow said some news outlets, namely the New York Times and Washington Post, seem especially enthralled with Trump, which might be “because they built subscriber bases that are obsessed with loathing Trump.” Some of the Washington Post’s coverage of the 50th anniversary of Watergate centers on Trump.
Garrow, the author of Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, has noted the sharp contrast between Obama’s quick disappearance from the headlines and Trump’s strong staying power.
“To have a former president who still looms at least as large as the incumbent is just utterly unprecedented in American history,” he said.
Some polling indicates the public is ready to move on from the Jan. 6 capitol riot. Navigator Research found that 39% of registered voters thought the House committee investigating the attack was too focused on the past, compared to 49% who said the committee was doing important work.
Aside from Jan. 6, Trump’s recent coverage often centers on his spate of endorsements and whether or not those candidates won. While Trump’s batting average is strong, it appears less so when isolated from other factors.
Most notably, Trump endorsed former Sen. David Perdue in a primary race against incumbent Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. That effort crashed spectacularly, with Kemp taking nearly 74% of the vote — more than three times as much as Perdue.
“As those Georgia results really highlighted, I don’t think Trump is necessarily doing well at all among Republicans,” said Garrow. “Instead, it’s the sort of Democratic media machine that doesn’t want to say goodbye.”
For Biden, reports have circulated in recent days that he’s frustrated with his staff for cleaning up and contextualizing his off-the-cuff statements, feeling that they undermine his authenticity and feed Republican attacks that he’s not fully in command. This, too, contrasts with Trump, whose unpolished manner of speaking was seen as one of his biggest calling cards. Biden is said to also be unhappy that his numbers are worse than Trump’s approval ratings for much of his term.
It has also been reported that Biden’s speeches often generate zero live television coverage from major networks. The president went all of March, April, and May without giving an extended one-on-one interview, a streak that’s finally set to end with an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
On the flip side, Democrats can take solace in the fact that Biden beat Trump in the 2020 election and that presumably most of his 81,283,361 voters prefer him over his predecessor.
Whether that’s enough to sustain momentum into the midterm elections and beyond remains to be seen, but the ratings return for this week’s Jan. 6 hearings may provide a clue as to how much the public is still interested in the former president.
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“I know the Democrats think that keeping Trump in the headlines is good for them politically, but I find that hard to believe,” said Feehery. “Trump is basically doing nothing, and he is the only thing the Democrats talk about. Trump derangement syndrome is no way to make amends with the vast middle of the voting public.”
