Trump’s Great Communicators

Throughout his time in office, President Reagan was frequently called the “Great Communicator,” as he was blessed with a wealth of experience on the screen and possessed an actor’s natural sense of stage presence. But in his initial weeks in office, Donald Trump has put together a team whose power and effectiveness have dwarfed even Reagan’s substantial efforts.

It has long been said (usually with express or implied derision) that Trump picks senior staff because they will “look good on TV.” But even to the extent this is true, it is clear that Trump understands the centrality of communications for 21st-century governance in a way that his critics do not.

Just a week into Donald Trump’s presidency, Ben Shapiro, who endorsed Trump in the 2024 election but has never been the president’s biggest fan, expressed shock at the effectiveness of the Trump team’s communications work. He had “never seen anything remotely like this extraordinary level of effective quality agenda advocacy from a Republican administration in my lifetime. It’s jaw-dropping.”

Responding to Shapiro, conservative commentator John Hawkins wrote that “Reagan set the standard for grassroots Republicans from the eighties to the present…. Now, Trump is setting a new standard for both groups in his 2nd term.”

“It gets better with every minute,” agreed the popular Libs of TikTok account.

“Even Reagan was nowhere near as effective as the entire collection of Trump team members,” noted Jim Hanson, a well-known D.C. consultant and political commentator.

Indeed, we’ve seen Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s command of the briefing room with a skill that Biden’s minions could only dream of. Meanwhile, she’s also moved strategically to bring new media including conservative voices long excluded into the room, cutting out legacy media while expanding outreach to the Right.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller has delighted in blowing up liberal arguments and eviscerating liberal journalists in numerous moments that have gone viral. Border Czar Tom Homan has provided countless memorable exchanges with the media that illustrate his team’s total dedication to taking control of our border and expelling illegals. And Vice President Vance has been a rapid-response paragon on X and an interview machine, providing win after win against the legacy media.

And, of course, atop it all is President Trump, who possesses a unique charisma that has generated the most passionate following of any contemporary politician. Trump is able to command attention and drive the media cycle like no other political figure of my lifetime.

But the collective skill of Trump’s great communicators isn’t just limited to a few people. It goes up and down the entire administration.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is an extraordinarily effective communicator himself, as he displayed in his deft first interview with Megyn Kelly. Those politicos with older memories may remember in 2009 when Rubio came roaring in from almost nowhere to defeat then-popular Governor Charlie Crist for the GOP Senate nomination. He was then the former majority leader of the Florida State House, but little-known outside of Florida political circles. Rubio’s surprise victory happened largely on the strength of his valedictory speech to the Florida House, an extraordinarily charismatic performance that was passed around online in GOP activist circles and led to a huge buzz that ultimately helped carry him to the nomination.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a Fox News veteran who saved what looked to be an initially doomed nomination campaign through making skilled public presentations and his ability to command the stage. In his first days as secretary of defense, Hegseth has already provided many camera-ready moments with the troops.

Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and RFK all generally shined in their hearings, deftly deflecting the Democratic senators who were confident they would get “gotcha” moments. Ditto Pam Bondi, Trump’s telegenic and combative attorney general. Former congressman Sean Duffy, who is now the Transportation Secretary, got his start as a reality TV star and, along with his wife, Fox News’s Rachel Campos-Duffy, is smooth in front of a camera.

Kristi Noem at Homeland Security was recently spotted riding horses with the border patrol at the U.S.-Mexico border in an image that hearkened back to Reagan. Even those without TV pedigrees, such as Elise Stefanik at the U.N., Chris Wright at the Department of Energy, and Doug Burgum at the Department of the Interior, have top academic pedigrees. Stefanik is a Harvard grad, Wright is an MIT grad, and Burgum went to Stanford’s business school. They clearly show an ability to think on their feet and communicate effectively, which has been absent in far too many past GOP cabinet members.

Of course, a media presence is not sufficient to successfully govern. You must have people who know the mechanisms of the bureaucracy—and Trump’s team is showing plenty of knowledge and skill there as well. DOGE staff are striking at weak points in the bureaucratic structure on a daily basis, while the Deep State faces a challenge unlike anything it has confronted in decades.

And then, of course, there is Elon Musk. Arguably outside of the president, he is the biggest mover in digital communications today, as he runs the world’s biggest social media platform in X, which allows him to swat down left-wing narratives in record time and give rapid responses.

Even famously camera-shy Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff and a leading architect of many of his strategies, is the daughter of legendary sports broadcaster Pat Summerall. She is clearly someone who understands the vital importance of good communications.

The communication dominance of Trump’s second administration is also visible online, where in recent days Trump’s rapid response team on X was doing in excess of 25 posts per day, and another 25 posts on Truth Social.

Trump has created a new communications template for the GOP. After decades of being famously inarticulate, the new-look Republican Party is flooding the zone with breaking news and almost instantaneous responses to criticism that the regime media cannot even begin to effectively counter.

“When Biden first took office in January, the New York Times wrote a story about how quiet the weekends were…. Now we’re back to basically where it’s just essentially nonstop every day,” said CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in a recent interview.

Ronald Reagan may have been the “Great Communicator,” but his impact and reach in a highly centralized media environment (in which almost all the outlets were controlled by his opponents) are dwarfed by Trump’s team of great communicators who are reaching a new level of what is possible in effective conservative political messaging.

The history of the Trump era is obviously still to be written. But it seems indisputable that one major aspect will be that Trump showed the GOP how it can fight back against a hostile media elite—and win.

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