Political communications between the American people and the American President have evolved dramatically since the foundation of the Republic, and the scale of communication has grown exponentially. With the growth and evolution of both political communications and the American Presidency, the current president, Donald J. Trump, is now harnessing relatively new forms of interaction to not only personally and immediately convey messages to his supporters at any time, but is also using political communication channels to directly present Presidential views and decisions to the American public. The central research question of this essay is to ask: is Donald Trump’s use of political communication represents a fundamentally new approach to the ways in American Presidents use political communications? To answer this question, the paper will analyze forms of political communications by American Presidents from the late 1800s and show how Presidential political communications have changed over time as newspapers gave way to radio, which gave way to television, which gave way to the early Internet. This provides a necessary historical context to the current period. In so doing, it will demonstrate that Donald Trump’s Presidential communications are primarily aimed at his core electoral base. They are not aimed at the broader American population. In particular, Trump’s use of Twitter allows him to immediately and authentically address his base, without any third parties mediating his communications.

Trump is the first president whose in-the-moment 140-character thoughts can be read by millions of people around the world; such immediacy was not possible in the age of newspapers, radio, television or even the early days of the Internet. Moreover, Twitter allows Trump’s supporters to immediately articulate their support for his political positions; the unmediated relationship between Trump and his supporters witnessed in his tweets reinforces his tendency to present immediate and unilaterally-decided policy decisions, without the advice of counsellors, and then expect his staff to scramble to react. This allows Trump to be the center of attention, which is a trait that he has displayed since his days as a star of reality television. His approach to political communications thus in fact reinforces his autarchic approach to policy-making, because Trump is able to introduce policies independently of his advisors and directly present them to his followers on Twitter in real time. This matters because historically presidential communications were mediated by outside counsel so that what the President said was carefully stage-managed in order to increase his appeal to a broader swathe of the potential electorate and to build a consensus in support of Presidential actions. Indeed, in the past the purpose of Presidential political communications was to increase support for the President by making him more likeable, human and seemingl