Business
Column: Bowing to business and the right wing, the SEC issues a pathetically watered-down climate disclosure rule
Corporate managements nationwide undoubtedly breathed sighs of relief Wednesday, when the Securities and Exchange Commission approved a rule mandating their disclosures of greenhouse gas emissions and risks from global warming.
That’s because the rule is much weaker than its original version, which was first published in March 2022. The final version removed provisions requiring disclosure of some emissions produced by a company’s entire business chain and expanded exemptions for smaller companies.
But if managements think they’ll be able to avoid making more complete disclosures than the SEC is requiring, they have another think coming.
Far more investors are making investment decisions that are informed by climate risk, and far more companies are making disclosures about climate risk.
— SEC Chairman Gary Gensler
Shareholders are demanding more. So is the European Union, which has enacted rules requiring all companies with EU branches employing more than 250 workers, more than $42 million in European revenues or more than $21 million in capital assets to make the very disclosures that the SEC dropped from its mandate, starting in 2025.
More than 3,200 U.S. corporations are expected to become subject to the EU mandate.
Then there’s California, which last year enacted two laws requiring companies with annual revenues of more than $500 million and business activities in the state to disclose their climate-related economic risks; companies with revenues of more than $1 billion face more stringent requirements to report the full range of their emissions, similar to the EU mandate.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and several other business lobbying groups have already filed a federal lawsuit to overturn the California law, in which they estimate that the laws will cover 10,000 companies. (Rule of thumb: If the Chamber of Commerce is on one side of a lawsuit, you can rarely go wrong in assuming the public interest is on the other side.)
In any event, the laws have the support of numerous corporations with headquarters or sizable business interests in California, including Microsoft and Apple.
“We know that consistent, comparable, and reliable emissions data at scale is necessary to fully assess the global economy’s risk exposure and to navigate the path to a net-zero future,” Microsoft and 14 other businesses wrote in an Aug. 14 letter to state legislative leaders.
The state’s legislation, they wrote, “would break new ground on ambitious climate policy and would allow the largest economic actors to fully understand and mitigate their harmful greenhouse gas emissions.”
Meanwhile, 10 states with Republican political leaderships have signaled that they will sue to invalidate the SEC initiative, on the claim that the rule “exceeds the agency’s statutory authority.”
All this does more than hint at the headwinds the SEC faced in crafting its final disclosure rule. These included objections from many in the business community and conservative politicians pursuing their fatuous campaigns against ESG policies — environmental, social and governance — of corporations and investment firms.
The SEC’s Democratic majority, led by its chairman, Gary Gensler, also plainly harbored concerns about how its more expansive rule proposal might fare with a conservative federal judiciary, including a Supreme Court that seems to be searching for grounds to pare back the reach of federal regulatory agencies, if not invalidate their authority altogether.
Gensler observed after the commission vote that its goal was to provide for consistency in how companies report information that most are already compiling.
“Far more investors are making investment decisions that are informed by climate risk, and far more companies are making disclosures about climate risk,” he said. He didn’t specifically defend the SEC’s weakening of its initial proposal, except to say that the plan was revised “based upon public feedback.”
Let’s take a closer look at the issues and the political context.
First, here’s what the SEC’s rule encompasses.
At its core are disclosures about emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide — emissions that trap heat within the Earth’s atmosphere, driving global temperatures higher. Global warming produces major changes in climatological manifestations — more storms of greater severity, droughts, melting ice producing a rise in sea levels, and so on.
Emissions fall into three general categories. Scope 1 emissions are those a company produces directly, say from its delivery trucks, boilers, refineries, manufacturing plants. Scope 2 emissions are those it produces indirectly, for example, from the power plants from which it purchases its electricity.
Scope 3 emissions are the most contentious. They’re produced by a company’s vendors when it orders supplies and consumers when they use its products. In general this is the largest category, accounting for 70% of total emissions for many businesses and as much as 90% for some. But they can be hard to define, calculate and manage.
The SEC originally contemplated requiring disclosures of all three categories. The final rule removed the Scope 3 reporting requirement entirely, and mandates reporting of Scope 1 and 2 emissions only when they have or are likely to have “a material impact on the registrant’s business strategy, results of operations, or financial condition.”
Those changes gratified some business organizations and their henchpersons in Congress, but disturbed environmental groups. Removing Scope 3 disclosures, said Danielle Fugere, president of the Berkeley-based environmental organization As You Sow, “creates a significant hole in shareholders’ understanding of climate risk.”
The fact is that full disclosure of these risks is something that regulators around the world, as well as shareholders and investors, have been demanding for years. Who’s against it? Head-in-the-sand Republicans and right-wing culture warriors, that’s who.
Hester Peirce, one of the two Republicans on the SEC, carried their ball into its meeting room. Weak as the final rule is, she wasn’t satisfied. As enacted, she groused in a statement Wednesday, the rule “still promises to spam investors with details about the Commission’s pet topic of the day — climate.”
That dismissal of global warming, an elemental threat to life on Earth, as a “pet topic” should tell you how fundamentally unserious GOP policymakers are about their responsibilities.
The anti-ESG cabal among state-level Republicans appears determined to undermine the interests of their own constituents, all for the sake of “owning the libs.”
Consider three states that have been among the leaders in banning investment firms from doing business with their governments because of the firms’ support for environmental policies: Texas, Florida and Louisiana.
Those are the three states that have led the nation in cumulative damage costs due to climate-related disasters from 1980 through 2022 — racking up expenses of $380 billion, $370 billion and $290 billion, respectively.
The general approach of disclosure critics has two threads. One is to pretend that the effects of global warming are irrelevant to the operations and the future of most businesses. The other is to assert that they’re too nebulous to calculate or, alternatively, that performing the calculations is just too burdensome.
Neither argument holds water.
I reported in 2021 that shareholders were already asking for more disclosures from managements about how their activities contribute to climate change, and more about how climate change will affect their destinies.
Fossil fuel companies weren’t the only targets of shareholder resolutions on these topics — they also appeared on the agendas of annual meetings of manufacturers, retailers, banks and many others.
In 2023, shareholder resolutions demanding climate and environmental disclosures dominated the proxy season with 146 filed, according to the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which tracks ESG issues. Many won plurality support, but more than half dealing with climate were withdrawn after managements made commitments to their sponsors to meet their disclosure goals.
Investment watchdogs are on the case. Fitch Ratings, which analyzes corporate creditworthiness, says that as many as 20% of the 1,650 corporations it studied might face ratings downgrades due to their “climate vulnerabilities if such risks are not mitigated” by 2035. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm, has said it’s not backing off from pushing corporations to disclose how they address climate-related risks.
The U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration identified 28 weather- and climate-related disasters costing $1 billion or more in 2023, including a drought, four floods, 22 severe storms and a wildfire.
2023 brought a record number of weather- and climate-related disasters costing more than $1 billion each to the U.S., with a toll of 492 deaths and damage of more than $90 billion.
(NOAA)
That was the highest number recorded since NOAA began taking count in 1980 and the ninth consecutive year in which 10 or more billion-dollar weather or climate disasters struck the U.S.
NOAA’s initial estimate is that the 2023 disasters cost more than $90 billion, but it’s certain to rise, since the ultimate price tag of the 18 disasters reported in 2022 came to more than $165 billion. The disasters took 492 lives.
To put it another way, any management of a large business in the U.S. that thinks it can evade the costs of global warming is living in a dream world.
Global warming deniers in business and politics persist in treating the climate crisis as merely a ginned-up topic of debate. That’s the gist of the business lobby’s lawsuit over the California laws.
The lawsuit treats the laws, bizarrely, as infringements on companies’ 1st Amendment rights. The state, the plaintiffs assert, is forcing “thousands of companies to engage in controversial speech that they do not wish to make” — speech they say is “political, and thus controversial.”
This is absurd on its face — tantamount to Donald Trump’s claim that by urging his followers to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, he was just exercising his right to free speech.
This would allow any mandated disclosure to be reduced to a free-speech violation — after all, any such disclosure must be expressed as a series of words.
The courts, including the Supreme Court, have generally rejected assertions that mandated disclosures violate the 1st Amendment when the disclosures serve a legitimate government interest, such as protecting investors from fraudulent claims, or providing investors with important information — for example, the level of emissions by a public corporation or its potential exposure to global warming.
In this case, the business lobbies stretch to the breaking point their description of the state’s mandated emission disclosures as mere speech. They also assert that the state’s purpose is merely to “fuel pressure campaigns against business.”
They can’t make that claim stick with a straight face, so they misrepresent the laws. Here’s how they quote a state Senate analysis of one of the statutes: “‘For companies, the knowledge’ that their compelled statements ‘will be publicly available might encourage them to take meaningful steps’ to support the policy goals of the state.”
That’s a flagrant misquotation. Here’s what the analysis actually said: “For companies, the knowledge that their emissions will be publicly available might encourage them to take meaningful steps to reduce GHG emissions.” The words and phrases that the plaintiffs replaced with their own tendentious language are in italics.
It’s not the “compelled statements” that will be publicly available, but the actual level of their emissions. If the result is “pressure campaigns” aimed at prompting the companies to be cleaner, what’s wrong with that?
As for the state’s “policy goals,” the laws aren’t aimed at supporting a goal cherished by the liberal legislators of California, as the plaintiffs want you to think, but the national and international goal of reducing greenhouse gases.
None of this is to say that the Chamber of Commerce and its fellow lobbies won’t prevail in court. But it’s proper to note that when the best arguments they muster are based on lies and misrepresentations, they might not have many other arrows in their quiver.
The Na’vi won the battle of the box office this weekend, as “Avatar: Fire and Ash” hauled in a hefty $88 million in the U.S. and Canada during its opening weekend.
The third installment of the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios’ “Avatar” franchise brought in an estimated total of $345 million globally, with about $257 million of that coming from international audiences. The movie reportedly has a budget of at least $350 million.
Box office analysts had expected a big international response to the most recent film, particularly since its predecessor “Avatar: The Way of Water” had strong showings in markets like Germany, France and China.
In China, the film opened to an estimated $57.6 million, marking the second highest 2025 opening for a U.S. film in the country since Disney’s “Zootopia 2” a few weeks ago. (That film went on to gross more than $271.7 million in China on its way to a global box office total of $1.1 billion.)
The strong response in China is another sign that certain movies can still do well in the country, which was once seen as a key force multiplier for big blockbusters and animated family films but has in recent years cooled to American movies due to geopolitics and the rise of its domestic film industry.
Angel Studio’s animated biblical tale “David” came in second at the box office this weekend, with an estimated domestic gross of $22 million. Lionsgate thriller “The Housemaid,” Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon Movies’ “The Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants” and “Zootopia 2” rounded out the top five.
The weekend’s haul likely comes as a relief to theater owners, who have weathered a roller coaster year.
After a difficult first three months, the spring brought hits like “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners” before the summer ended mostly flat. A sleepy fall brought panic to the exhibition business until closer to the Thanksgiving holiday, when “Wicked: For Good” and “Zootopia 2” drew in audiences.
Dear Liz: When I retired, I had a small 401(k) with about $12,000 in it. Instead of rolling that money into an IRA, I took a distribution and paid taxes on it. I had no immediate need for the remaining funds, so eventually I opened a new IRA account and deposited the money.
I now realize I should have put it in a Roth IRA so I wouldn’t face double taxation on the money. This is the stupidest thing I’ve done in recent memory. Is there any legal mechanism I can use to get that money out and into a Roth without paying taxes the second time?
Answer: You made a mistake, but probably not the one you think.
You can’t contribute to an IRA — or a Roth IRA, for that matter — if you don’t have earned income. So if you’ve fully retired, you should contact your IRA administrator and let them know you need to withdraw your “excess contribution” as well as any earnings the contribution has made.
If you contributed this year, you have until your tax filing deadline — typically April 15, 2026 — to remove the funds without penalty. If you contributed in a previous year, you’ll typically face a 6% excise tax for each year the money remained in your account.
Now, a warning about financial mistakes: They tend to become more common as we age. That can be incredibly unsettling, especially to do-it-yourselfers used to handling finances competently on their own. Retirement is a good time to start implementing some guardrails to protect ourselves and our money.
Hiring a tax pro would be a good first step. Anything to do with a retirement fund should be run past this pro first to make sure you’re following the tax rules.
Dear Liz: In response to a reader who asked about creating a will, you suggested options for low-cost online resources. That is great! But, I would encourage you to remind readers to designate beneficiaries on accounts and assets where that option is available.
While they should still have a will, many readers may not know that they can add beneficiaries to brokerage, checking, and savings accounts (in addition to IRA and retirement accounts) so that their assets will pass directly to the designated beneficiaries and not have to go through probate with the extra hassle, time and expense.
For those without a trust, designating beneficiaries may be the easiest way to pass on many of their assets. In California (and some other states), even houses may pass without probate with a transfer-on-death deed. Many readers may not know about the option to add beneficiaries, and you would do your readers a service by educating them about it.
Answer: Anyone adding beneficiaries to accounts needs to be aware of some major potential drawbacks.
A big one involves settling the estate. If all available funds are transferred directly to beneficiaries, the person settling the estate may not have enough cash to do their job.
Beneficiary designations can also result in unintentionally unequal distributions if there’s more than one heir, and complications if the beneficiaries die first or aren’t changed appropriately as life circumstances change.
That’s not to say that beneficiary designations are the wrong choice, but they’re certainly not a one-size-fits-all option.
Dear Liz: Your recent column about advanced directives said that people could get a free version at PrepareForYourCare.org. I found there is a charge. Is this for all online directives?
Answer: Prepare is a free site supported by donations, grants and licensing agreements. If you were asked to pay, you either clicked the donate button or weren’t on the correct site.
Liz Weston, Certified Financial Planner, is a personal finance columnist. Questions may be sent to her at 3940 Laurel Canyon, No. 238, Studio City, CA 91604, or by using the “Contact” form at asklizweston.com.
To understand how Mr. Trump has achieved this omnipresence, The New York Times reviewed the first 329 days of his second term, finding at least one instance each day when he attracted the public’s attention to himself and his actions.
The review encompassed more than 250 media appearances, more than 320 official appearances, and more than 5,000 Truth Social posts or reposts. The analysis shows that while Mr. Trump has lagged his predecessors in his number of official appearances, he has pursued a raft of innovative methods to force himself into the public consciousness on a daily, and sometimes even hourly, basis.
The battery of activity started from the moment he was inaugurated, when he traveled from the Capitol Building to the Capital One Arena to publicly sign a flurry of executive orders.
Since then, he has stayed in the public eye in part by doing things no president has ever done. High-stakes Oval Office meetings, like his negotiations with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, are held on-camera and broadcast live on global news networks. His Q.-and-A. sessions with reporters frequently last an hour or more.
He regularly airs his opinions – on social media, in discursive asides at rallies – about idiosyncratic subjects that range widely across the zeitgeist, from Sydney Sweeney’s sexy denim ads to the redesigned logo of the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain to the mysterious fate of the aviator Amelia Earhart, who vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
And his engagement with the news media has soared well beyond the start of his first administration.
Through Dec. 14, Mr. Trump took reporters’ questions on 449 occasions, compared with 223 during the same period of his first term. On average, Mr. Trump has interacted with journalists roughly twice a day, doubling his rate from 2017, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University political scientist who tracks presidential press interactions. Mr. Trump limits which news outlets can ask questions at small events, but in sheer volume, he is the most media-accessible modern president, and far outpaces his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Reporters will be in my office asking me for the president’s reaction to a breaking news story,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in an interview. “And I’ll just say to them, ‘I don’t know, why don’t you ask him yourself in 30 minutes?’”
President Trump’s media appearances have soared this year, more than doubling both the Biden administration’s and those of his own first term.
Finding the Cameras
Many of his public moments go viral online, like his diatribe about restoring the name of the Washington Redskins, or the A.I.-generated video meme he posted of himself dribbling a soccer ball with Cristiano Ronaldo in the Oval Office. They take on a life of their own, rippling across social media and dissected and amplified by influencers and mass media platforms alike.
The result is a president whose not-so-inner monologue is injected into our daily lives in myriad ways, when we are watching TV on the weekends or idly scrolling the web – a Greek chorus for our national narrative.
“He’s the most ubiquitous president ever,” said Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian.
The media strategy aligns with his political strategy.
Dating back to his years as an outspoken real estate developer and reality TV star, Mr. Trump has relished being unavoidable for comment. But at age 79, he has been outdoing his younger self. And there is a logic to his logorrhea.
Mr. Trump’s allies often speak of the political benefits of flooding the zone: pursuing so many policies, ideas, and dramatic restructurings of the normal ways of governance as to overwhelm the system. “All pedal, no brake,” as Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s one-time adviser, has called it.
“We joke internally that he is our ultimate director of communications,” Ms. Leavitt said. “He has incredible media instincts, and he is the final decision maker on all policy, and he has been in a ‘flood the zone,’ ‘do as much as possible’ mindset since he walked into the Oval Office on Jan. 20.”
All presidents benefit from the awesome news-making powers of the office, with its agenda-setting influence over a dedicated global press corps. But Mr. Trump has outstripped his predecessors in whipsawing the public’s attention onto matters small and large – and limiting the level of scrutiny that any one shocking remark or policy proposal receives.
“People can really only focus on a handful of things a day,” said Bill Burton, a deputy White House press secretary under former President Barack Obama. “This attention flood is working for Trump because he is able to do an extraordinary amount of executive actions and very little of it can get attention.”
Or as Mr. Brinkley put it: “He plays to win the day, every day, around the clock.”
His commentary takes on a life of its own.
One of Mr. Trump’s political assets is his instinct for virality.
With a natural feel for the web, Mr. Trump has a knack for amplifying wacky memes and pop culture curios that can drive days of online discourse. Sometimes, coverage of his offhand remarks or late-night social media posts can crowd out the more significant, norm-shattering changes he is making to American governance.
Late one Friday night in May, the president posted an obviously A.I.-generated image of himself as the pope. It struck a nerve.
Mr. Trump had already courted controversy days earlier, after the death of Pope Francis on April 21.
“I’d like to be pope,” the president told reporters who asked about who should become the next pontiff. “That would be my number one choice.”
The comment disturbed some Catholics, who said the notion was crude and insensitive. That reaction seemed only to prompt Mr. Trump to double down, posting the A.I.-generated image to his Truth Social account days later. By the weekend it had become a cultural phenomenon, mocked on “Saturday Night Live” and called out by experts as an example of misleading A.I. content.
After Mr. Trump posts the A.I. image …
May 2
Trump posts A.I. image of himself as Pope
There is nothing clever or funny about this image, Mr. President. We just buried our beloved Pope Francis and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St. Peter. Do not mock us.
May 3
NYS Catholic Conference says “do not mock us”
May 3
“Saturday Night Live” covers fake image
May 3 Vatican asked about image, declines to comment
May 4
Cardinal Joseph Tobin of New Jersey criticizes image as “not good”
May 4
JD Vance defends Trump on X, calling it a joke … some Catholics were outraged, prompting a news cycle focused on the controversy …
5
Says “the Catholics loved it”
… before Mr. Trump suggested he had nothing to do with it.
Mr. Trump, who is not Catholic, had plenty of defenders, too. They said his commentary and the A.I. image were simply jokes, part of the president’s unique comedic style.
“As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen,” Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, wrote on X.
In his quest for attention, the president is often aided by a cottage industry of right-wing influencers and activists who are primed to syndicate, reinforce and defend whatever content he pushes out each day. For this conservative media ecosystem, Mr. Trump’s messaging and commentary are the raw fuel that drives clicks, shares and views.
On June 7, the president’s visit to a raucous U.F.C. fight – complete with a “Trump dance” entrance into the arena – generated an immediate spike in online interest, including about 50,000 posts on X. Five days later, when he promoted a “Trump gold card” visa, his announcement led to roughly 30,000 posts on X.
A barrage that distracts from bad news.
One pattern in Mr. Trump’s behavior: When his administration is faced with bad news, he launches a fusillade of distraction.
This can take the form of outlandish, out-of-left-field claims about political opponents. Or he might weigh in on a pop culture subject far afield from Washington politics – from the ratings of late-night hosts like Seth Meyers to the physical appearance of a megastar like Taylor Swift.
The events of July 2025 offer a case in point.
As the Jeffrey Epstein files returned to the news – along with speculation that Mr. Trump might appear in them – the president embarked on a breathtaking series of tangents. Mr. Trump claimed without evidence that former President Bill Clinton had bankrolled an effort by senior intelligence officials to frame him for a crime, mused about stripping the actress Rosie O’Donnell of her U.S. citizenship, and accused the singer Beyoncé of accepting millions of dollars to endorse his erstwhile rival, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
July 8
F.B.I. publishes memo about Epstein files On July 8, the F.B.I. said it would not declassify more Epstein files.
10
Claimed intelligence officials tried to frame him
10
Pushed to defund NPR and PBS
10 Directed ICE to arrest protesters
12
Threatened Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship
15
Claimed Adam Schiff engaged in mortgage fraud Over the following days, Mr. Trump seemed to lash out in every direction.
On July 18, the Justice Department filed a request to unseal grand jury testimony about Mr. Epstein, again raising questions about Mr. Trump’s involvement. The president promptly lobbed insults at late-night talk show hosts, dismissed the Epstein affair as “fake news” and shared fresh claims about a supposed Obama administration plot to undermine him after the 2016 election.
July 18
Request filed to unseal grand jury testimony
On July 18, the Department of Justice filed a request — later denied — to unseal grand jury testimony.
20
Criticized Washington Commanders name
21
Called the “Russia hoax” the “crime of the century”
22
Called Epstein controversy “fake news”
22
Criticized Kimmel and Fallon
24 Criticized Federal Reserve chairman
Over the following days, Mr. Trump bounced from topic to topic.
On July 25, The Wall Street Journal published a major scoop: The paper had unearthed a risqué birthday letter that Mr. Trump had apparently written to Mr. Epstein in 2003. Mr. Trump responded with his attack on Beyoncé and revived his threat to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV networks. Then he announced the imminent construction of an enormous gilded ballroom at the White House, at a cost of $200 million. (He has since revised the cost upward to $400 million.)
Asked if there was a deliberate strategy to distract from negative news, Ms. Leavitt noted that every administration seeks to minimize unhelpful headlines.
“Yes, there have been times in which we’ve tried to do that, but also often it just happens naturally, because the president is willing to weigh in on so many subjects,” she said. “Sometimes it’s really not deliberate. It’s just him speaking his mind on whatever news cycle or news story is brought to him in that moment.”
He has added tricks to his arsenal.
Mr. Trump’s devotion to Truth Social mirrors the hair-trigger Twitter habit of his first term; on one recent December evening, he posted 158 times between 9 p.m. and midnight. And he has continued to appear on Fox News with certain preferred hosts.
But this year, he has added to his media arsenal by appearing in many more public spaces that fall outside of a president’s typical itinerary.
Mr. Trump has stopped by a Washington Commanders N.F.L. game, popped up in the New York Yankees locker room, attended the Ryder Cup golf tournament and the men’s tennis final at the U.S. Open, sat ringside at numerous U.F.C. fights, and traveled to the Daytona 500. He is the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl. When FIFA staged the Club World Cup final in New Jersey, Mr. Trump not only attended, but joined the winning team onstage for the trophy ceremony.
The net effect is a sense of inescapability, that no corner of American life remains Trump-free – which itself amounts to a potent expression of presidential authority and command. “His power, in part,” said Mr. Burton, the former Obama aide, “comes from the attention that people give him, or that he forces on them.”
Can it ever be too much?
In the fall of 2009, President Barack Obama appeared on David Letterman’s talk show, gave interviews to CNBC and Men’s Health magazine, and made the rounds of all five major network Sunday shows. Washington was abuzz about whether he was overexposed.
That debate sounds quaint today. But the question of whether a president can be too visible remains open.
“The public is being desensitized” to Mr. Trump’s omnipresence, argued Mr. Brinkley, the historian. “It starts becoming blather. The enemy for Trump isn’t Democrats; it’s the public being bored with the show.”
Ms. Leavitt said that if there was a risk to his ubiquity, “President Trump would not be president right now.” She added: “He is a businessman who speaks his mind and tells it like it is, and sometimes people don’t like that. But obviously the vast majority of our country does, or else he wouldn’t be in this office.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, the public eventually tired of his frenzied pace. And in some ways, Mr. Trump appears to be slowing down physically as he approaches his 80th birthday in June (which he will celebrate in part by staging a nationally broadcast U.F.C. fight on the White House lawn). He has appeared to doze at some Oval Office meetings, and he is holding fewer formal public events than he did at this point in 2017.
Still, Mr. Trump and his team have embraced the everywhere-all-at-once nature of modern media. Average Americans, busy with work and family, do not tune in for daytime news conferences or Cabinet meetings. And 6:30 p.m. newscasts and local newspapers are no longer the primary vessels by which Americans learn about their commander-in-chief.
Instead, politics now suffuses our lives as a kind of ambient noise – via TikTok videos, social media posts, YouTube talk shows and family Facebook messages – never fully separate from our leisure pursuits. “Right now the game is attention, in terms of what’s culturally breaking through,” Mr. Burton said. “The fact that so much message exists is the point.”
Mr. Trump has both propelled this merging of culture and politics, and continues to strategically exploit it. In December, he became the first president to personally host the Kennedy Center Honors, comparing himself onstage to Johnny Carson and musing that he would do a better job than Jimmy Kimmel.
“This is the greatest evening in the history of the Kennedy Center,” Mr. Trump told the crowd. “Not even a contest. There has never been anything like it.”
His performance will air in prime time on CBS on Dec. 23.
Photo and video sources: Graham Dickie/The New York Times; Doug Mills/The New York Times; Roll Call Factba.se; PBS; Mauro Pimentel/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Kenny Holston/The New York Times; The New York Times; Annabelle Gordon/Reuters; Eric Lee/The New York Times; Fox; Cheriss May for The New York Times; Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press; Margo Martin, via Storyful; Mark Abramson for The New York Times; Global News; Al Drago/Getty Images; Fox News; Dave Sanders for The New York Times; Pete Marovich for The New York Times; Ted Shaffrey/Associated Press … Show all
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