On the first night of his second presidency, Donald J. Trump was back in the Oval Office, doing something he sorely missed during those four long years out of power: mixing it up with the White House press corps.
“Nice to see you again!” he said as a pack of reporters crowded in front of the Resolute Desk and began volleying huge, consequential questions about Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, Venezuela and Gaza across it.
“Stranger things have happened,” he mused playfully when asked if he might send Special Forces across the southern border. “That’s a big one!” he ooh-ed dramatically when an aide presented him with an executive order declaring Mexican drug cartels foreign terrorist organizations. He discovered a letter left for him in the desk by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and began to wave it around in the air — another shiny object to draw the cameras in a little closer.
At one point, he looked up at Peter Doocy, a Fox News reporter who covered the last occupant of the Oval Office, and asked: “Does Biden ever do news conferences like this? How many news conferences, Peter, has he done like this?”
“Like this?” Mr. Doocy asked incredulously. “Zero.”
Mr. Biden rarely engaged with the press in anything but the most structured of circumstances. His successor sees the ability to capture the attention of reporters at a moment’s notice as one of the best parts of the gig. Not long after he left office in 2021, Mr. Trump told an aide to “get the pool,” referring to the rotating group of journalists that travels daily with the president, because he wanted to “make a statement.” He had to be reminded that there was no longer a pool.
But now he is back — and so is the omnipresent clutch of cameras and reporters at his side. He’s already making the most of it. After his Inaugural Address on Monday, Mr. Trump gave an impromptu speech at the Capitol about the official address, then held a rally, then took more than 100 questions in the Oval Office and then spoke at some balls.
Day 2 brought another news conference.
This one was in the Roosevelt Room. It was nominally to highlight a $100 billion investment for an artificial intelligence initiative. He stood beside three billionaires — OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman; SoftBank’s chief, Masayoshi Son; and Oracle’s founder, Larry Ellison — and eagerly fielded questions for half an hour. It quickly got off track.
Journalists were more interested in pressing Mr. Trump on why he had pardoned people who had violently attacked police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. An event intended to promote a huge new technology investment instead became tangled up in talk about Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
Privately, some advisers winced as he began taking questions, predicting exactly this sort of result. But Mr. Trump’s volubility in his first few days back in office underscores that, more than ever, he is in control of his own show. (His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has yet to give her first briefing.)
Politically, there are pluses and minuses to his approach.
“His huge advantage is he is able to overwhelm his critics with just the sheer volume of news he produces,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican messaging guru who worked for former Speaker John Boehner, former Senator Mitt Romney and former President George W. Bush. “The risk is, oftentimes, when you have that much volume, you tend to lose the narrative, and you’re not able to just drive one signal. In political communications, that is really needed to be able to crystallize a message, to have it connect with the moment.”
Just because a president is seemingly oh-so-available to take questions and to riff does not, of course, translate to openness and transparency from the White House. Still, after four years of relative access starvation, some White House reporters were happily embracing their newfound opportunities.
During the Biden administration, Mr. Doocy said, he spent a lot of time “figuring out how to boil a question down into something that’s eight seconds long at the most that I could shout to him, hoping to get his attention to get a one- or two-word answer at best while he’s exiting the room.”
“It’s the complete opposite now with Trump,” he said. “I went in there on Monday with two pages of questions.” And they all got answered.
Mr. Doocy called Mr. Trump “the TV producer president” and said the way he waved around the letter Mr. Biden left for him in the Resolute Desk was done for “maximum suspense.”
“It was such a dramatic reveal,” Mr. Doocy said, laughing. “Open the drawer, don’t take it out right away, have people asking what’s in there, gasping. I could not see the previous president wanting to do anything unknown on live television, and I definitely don’t think his aides would have ever let him.”
On Wednesday, the White House decided to open the letter for Mr. Doocy, giving him an exclusive peek at the (fairly anodyne) message scrawled from one president to another.
“I know that between now and tomorrow in Trump world, there will be 15 news cycles,” Mr. Doocy said. But it still made for a good little story.
