All the President's Trolls

Ryan Heshmati

March 21, 2025

With each passing day comes a new fury President Trump ignites. It can seem like his actions either come from an intent to frustrate his opponents or that he, in a sense, is living in his own world. American presidents have historically had their own eccentricities, like Calvin Coolidge who was known as a man of few words; that’s certainly not Trump, though. As much as the president enjoys enraging his opponents, it’s also possible that his decisions come from an intent to distract.

With the media fixated on whatever is his latest Truth Social post, Trump can cloud the American institutions meant to check the Executive Branch’s power in so much fog that they grow paralyzed. While it sounds bizarre, as the adage goes, “a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes.” Further, the president has made so many outlandish statements over the years he may benefit from a public that is jaded with hearing about it. While understandable, the urge to “turn off” the news gives Trump the power to continue advancing his agenda, even when at odds with established precedents for presidents.

In one of his recent proclamations, the president declared Former President Biden’s pardons “OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” claiming the president used an autopen to sign them as a part of a broader claim that Biden “did not know anything about them!” The president’s sensationalist approach to the presidency, while nothing new, still evokes an immense response. Now, perhaps the president really believes he can declare Biden’s pardons void, though it seems incredibly unlikely that the courts will come to the same conclusion, nevertheless, he continued succeeding in putting the media into overdrive just to scramble and keep up with his antics.

A cursory scroll of President Trump’s Truth Social posts yields a seemingly endless supply of peculiar capitalization, inflammatory comments, and self-aggrandizement. If Trump is a troll, Truth Social provides a testament to just how much he loves to keep on going.

With the Trump administration determined to reshape the United States government, both in size and scope, President Trump keeps the cameras on him while the likes of Elon Musk’s DOGE get to work. Of course, the media is not ignoring DOGE, which has been in the spotlight on its own quite substantially, but at some point, when there is just too much to cover, where are we left? Only months into the second Trump administration, the changes are significant; ultimately, even President Trump himself, what the next four years have in store remains to be seen.