Volodymyr Zelenskyy had come to discuss the war in Ukraine, but he ended up serving as a player in what can sometimes seem like a made-for-TV presidency.
With television cameras recording the Oval Office showdown, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance lectured the leader of Ukraine, arguing he hadn’t shown proper gratitude for the billions of dollars in military assistance the United States has given to his country. Sitting knee-to-knee, the leaders shook their hands and talked over each other.
Vance demanded Zelenskyy say thank you. Zelenskyy insisted he had, many times. Trump said Zelenskyy wasn’t acting thankful. On and on it went, for nearly an hour, until Trump decided he’d seen enough. He sent the news crews packing, with a final parting shot: “This is going to be great television, I will say that,” Trump said, grinning as he looked directly into the camera.
In Trump’s White House, there’s often great television. The second-term president, who was a TV reality star before trying his hand at politics, has taken the stagecraft skills he honed hosting 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” and put them to work in his latest turn as leader of the free world.
“He lives every day writing a script about his own reality in which he is the producer, director, screenwriter and star,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien said. “He thinks very cinematically about everything.”
100 days choreographed for TV
When you’re president, the world is a stage. In Trump’s case, it can sometimes function as a television studio.
On his first day back in office in January, the 78-year-old Trump signed a series of executive orders at a desk set up in the middle of a jam-packed sports arena filled with thousands of his cheering supporters. As a presidential aide described the contents of each order over a loudspeaker, Trump wrote his name on the documents in big, loopy letters and then held them up, one at a time, for the crowd and the television cameras to see.