It did not take Donald Trump long to put himself at the center of a media circus. In the days following the launch of American Eagle’s ad campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney and a plausibly deniable shout-out to eugenics, the president had a lot of fires to put out. The media was anxious to talk about what made him can the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics; people were once again waiting for a straight answer on his tariff plan; everybody dished on his about-face on the Epstein Files. What better time to issue a statement of support for a young blonde who had been revealed as a registered Republican? Except that the statement ended up in a very different place than it began.
In his Aug. 4 post on Truth Social, Trump wrote that Sweeney “has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there,” following it up with an exhortation to “Go get ‘em Sydney!” Grandpa Culture War could have left it there, except he couldn’t: His statement of support concluded with him revisiting one of his longest-running grudges, that against Taylor Swift, writing, “Ever since I alerted the world as to what [Swift] was by saying on TRUTH that I can’t stand her (HATE!) She was booed out of the Super Bowl and became, NO LONGER HOT. The tide has seriously turned — Being WOKE is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Donald Trump calling Sydney Sweeney hot was not on my 2025 bingo card pic.twitter.com/dibFfpFcio
— greg (@greg16676935420) August 4, 2025
Of course, it’s not our attention the president seeks. Trump’s preoccupation with popular culture is, for many people, his only relatable quality. He’s captivated by Shark Week, pro wrestling and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. He’s a sucker for Village People sing-alongs. Before Twitter became his favored mode of attack, it was the platform on which he issued impassioned pleas to Robert Pattinson to break up with “Twilight” costar Kristen Stewart, writing, “Everyone knows I am right . . . In a couple of years, he will thank me. Be smart, Robert.”
But pop culture rarely returns the love. And the speed with which the president’s defense of one young woman morphed into a rant about another underscored a not-so-secret torment: All his power, legitimate and otherwise, can’t compel cultural icons to his side.
American presidents have always leveraged the media tools available to them: From Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s nationally broadcast “fireside chats” and John F. Kennedy’s Sinatra-scored campaign to Bill Clinton’s sax solos on Arsenio Hall and Barack Obama slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon, mass culture has helped the nation’s leaders connect with voters and showcase their best angles. But Trump is the first purely pop-culture president, pivoting from reality-show stardom into a presidential run with no interstitial period of holding local or state office and no previous engagement with the nuts and bolts of legislation, diplomacy and statecraft. The media magic that for other presidents was a means to an end was, for him, the end itself.
The speed with which the president’s defense of one young woman morphed into a rant about another underscored a not-so-secret torment: All his power, legitimate and otherwise, can’t compel cultural icons to his side.
Ronald Reagan is often name-checked as the man whose trajectory from entertainment to politics most resembles Trump’s. Both successfully spun ugly racial animus into so-called populist rhetoric, but Reagan used his Hollywood background to create an epic, cinematic vision of optimistic national go-getting that would ensure good’s triumph over evil.
Trump’s own vision, by contrast, was narrower and meaner right out of the gate thanks to his own background in the combative, ink-smeared world of tabloids and deal sheets in which everyone was plotting, watching their backs and calculating where they stood. He became famous by planting stories about himself in gossip columns and assuming the identity of PR flacks in order to brag about himself in the third person. He became infamous by centering himself in a racist media frenzy that saw five young Black men unjustly charged for the rape of a jogger in Central Park. His desire to be legitimized by New York City’s media elite was the stuff of legend; when satirical magazine Spy described him as a “short-fingered vulgarian,” the resounding specificity lingered for decades. In a 2016 Politico story, former Spy co-editor Graydon Carter claimed that Trump vehemently contested the charge, and gleefully renewed it: “Now that [the insult has] become sort of part of the whole campaign rhetoric, I’m sure he wants to just kill me — with those little hands.”
It’s not difficult to envision a world in which Donald Trump came to be an American president in a different way, given that almost as soon as he began garnering notice outside the five boroughs, talk-show hosts were asking whether he intended to run for president. (If you were a mediagenic white man with money in the 1980s, it was a foregone conclusion that you eventually would.) According to biographer Michael D’Antonio, Trump actually used the pretense of a presidential run to promote his first book, “The Art of the Deal.” In conversation with Larry King in 1999, he again teased the possibility, and even identified Oprah Winfrey as his ideal VP.
But his actual candidacy ultimately grew from an uglier, more reactive place. His resentment of Barack Obama was rooted in race and expressed via open racism, as New York Times columnist Charles Blow noted in a 2017 piece titled “Trump’s Obama Obsession.” But it was also a resentment of the ease with which Obama drew the cultural validation Trump had chased for years. What Obama had that eluded Trump, wrote Blow, was a public embrace that wasn’t about power or fear, but about genuine admiration: “Trump accrued financial wealth, but he never accrued cultural capital, at least not among those from whom he most wanted it.”
Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.
This remains as true in Trump’s second term as it was in the first. The difference is that he is now weaponizing that resentment wherever and whenever he can against the individuals and institutions that have shown him insufficient deference. In February, he mounted a takeover of Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center performing-arts complex, installing himself as the head of a new board of trustees and proposing that the name be changed to honor his wife, Melania. In May, he used Truth Social to announce the firing of the director of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery — something the president does not have the authority to do — on the grounds that she supported D.E.I. initiatives. Last month, artist Amy Sherald canceled her upcoming solo exhibit after gallery leadership suggested that her portrait of a transgender Statue of Liberty might upset the president.
Then there was the fight Trump picked with Bruce Springsteen this spring after a run of concerts at which The Boss whipped up audiences with some choice words about restoring democracy. One of the allegedly defamatory phrases cited in the subsequent lawsuit is “con man,” the common diminutive of “confidence man” — which also happens to be the title of New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s 2022 book about the president. (Trump has not sued Haberman for defamation.)
Elsewhere, after bringing CBS to heel, the president gloated over the cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and is likely fuming that the show drew record-high ratings the following week. This week, the target of his ire is “CBS Mornings” cohost Gayle King, whose “woke” show he predicted would soon follow Colbert’s. The Season 27 premiere of “South Park” — a ruthlessly profane dunkfest that was also the series’ most-watched premiere since 1999 — was followed by the announcement that the CBS executive responsible for axing Colbert is now the show’s big boss. Offscreen, Trump’s evidence-free accusation that Barack Obama committed treason by investigating his ties to Russian election meddling in 2016 has resulted in the announcement that his Department of Justice was launching a grand-jury probe; on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Trump denied having anything to do with the action, but was also quick to state that “they deserve it.”
It’s not that Trump spurns those who do show him deference: In April, he graciously let Kid Rock broker a meeting with longtime critic Bill Maher, which resulted in the talk-show host rolling over for presidential belly rubs in record time. But like many powerful men, he’s more likely to be captivated by those who don’t bend to his will — and to make his unfulfilled desires everyone else’s problem. It’s no longer possible to take comfort in his torment. A fragile ego is a weapon that gets more dangerous with time, and this one has already caused too much damage.
