# Donald Trump's two terms: a president who is his own press office The Trump administration is the United States executive branch under President Donald Trump, from January 2017 to January 2021 and again from January 2025. This page reads its public messaging, its dealings with the press and the platforms, and the agency posters and reports in the FRAME archive, as of the archive's roster dated 29 September 2026. Administrations Donald Trump's two terms: a president who is his own press office Illustration, not an archive object - Home - Administrations - Donald Trump's two terms: a president who is his own press office At a glance The Trump administration, 2017–2021 and from 2025: the president's own accounts, agency reports and posters, press-pool access, and the platform inquiries. Period2017–2021, 2025–Full record at propagandaarchive.org The Trump administration is the United States executive branch under President Donald Trump, from January 2017 to January 2021 and again from January 2025. This page reads its public messaging, its dealings with the press and the platforms, and the agency posters and reports in the FRAME archive, as of the archive's roster dated 29 September 2026. This administration is still in office, so this page is a reading at a date, not a history. The FRAME record it draws on gives its roster as of 29 September 2026. The test is the one this site applies to Wilson and Roosevelt: who held the power, whether the audience could say no, and whether speech, due process, and equal treatment came through. The same test applies to the administration in between, and the Disinformation Governance Board of 2022 is on this site for that reason. Donald Trump, official presidential portrait, 2025. Photograph by Daniel Torok for the White House; public domain (U.S. federal government work), as the FRAME record credits it. ## Two terms, and the institutions that held around them Trump, a businessman and television host with no prior office, carried the Electoral College on 8 November 2016 and was sworn in on 20 January 2017 with Mike Pence. The House impeached him twice, on 18 December 2019 and on 13 January 2021. The Senate acquitted him both times, on 5 February 2020 and 13 February 2021. He lost the election of 3 November 2020 to Joe Biden and said the result was a fraud. He and his allies brought dozens of suits; the courts dismissed or rejected them, the states certified their results, and he left office on 20 January 2021. The fraud claim was tested in the forum built to test it, and it failed there. That is the record. He won again on 5 November 2024 and was sworn in on 20 January 2025 with JD Vance, the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve two terms that are not consecutive. Parties competed, courts ruled against the government and for it, a privately owned press covered all of it, and Congress confirmed most of the officials on the FRAME roster. Those are the checks a propaganda state removes. They were working, and they deserve to be named before anything else here. ## The president as his own broadcaster In the first term the president's personal Twitter account was a main channel for announcements. On 9 July 2019 the Second Circuit ruled unanimously in Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump that the account had been held out as official and worked as a public forum, so blocking critics from it was viewpoint discrimination barred by the First Amendment. That ruling is the plain constitutional answer: a public official who uses a space for public business may not pick which citizens may reply. Twitter suspended the account on 8 January 2021, citing the risk of further incitement of violence. That was a private company's decision, and whether government pressure on platforms shaped decisions like it is a separate question, taken up in the FRAME case study on jawboning. The archive records two first-term remarks as techniques. On 15 August 2017, asked about the violence at a rally in Virginia, the president answered with a counter-question. what about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? Donald Trump, remarks and exchange with reporters, New York City, 15 August 2017. Transcript: American Presidency Project. As quoted on the FRAME Trump administration page. The archive files that under whataboutism: a question about one side answered with a question about the other. The second is the phrase "Chinese Virus," used on 16 March 2020. That was the same date printed on the White House household mailer discussed below. A national label on a disease is name-calling whatever the origin of the virus turns out to be, and the archive sets it beside the 1942 labels in its comparison of ethnic labels for an enemy or a disease. In the second term the president announces some decisions on Truth Social. On 2 April 2026 he wrote there that Attorney General Pam Bondi would be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector. The White House also launched an official account, Rapid Response 47, on 27 January 2025. We will be supporting President Donald J. Trump's America First agenda and holding the Fake News accountable for their lies. Rapid Response 47 launch statement, 27 January 2025, as reported by Fox News. As quoted on the FRAME Trump administration page. An official account paid for by the public, with a stated job of attacking named news outlets, is a government speaking against its own press. Government may answer a story it thinks false. It is on firmer ground doing that with facts than with a brand. ## What the agencies printed in the first term The archive holds eleven objects attributed to this administration. Several are federal reports in which the evidence was arranged toward one conclusion. A Council of Economic Advisers report of December 2019 opened by calling the labor market the strongest it has been in the last half century and credited that partly to the president's economic policies. An Office of Science and Technology Policy report of October 2020 gave a page to a presidential quotation about unlimited frontiers. A White House trade office chart of 2 October 2020 set two procurement totals, $332.86 billion and $418.82 billion, on an axis that starts at $300 billion, so the second bar looks several times the first; the text calls the two windows "Obama-Biden" and "Trump-Pence," and fiscal 2017 is left out. A Council on Environmental Quality overview of January 2021 listed accomplishments and nothing counted against them. Every administration publishes reports like these. They are still advocacy printed at public expense, and the reader should treat them that way. The public-health items are different. The March 16, 2020 household mailer carried CDC guidance under the heading "President Trump's Coronavirus Guidelines for America," so the advice traveled with the president's name. The CDC's December 2020 poster borrowed the wartime "We Can Do It!" pose. Both asked for voluntary steps, and both named their sender. The COVID-19 campaigns hub and the posters and mailers page read them in detail and do not rule on the science. A 2018 Department of Homeland Security sheet in the "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign put fifteen icons of suspicious activity over pictures of homes, a stadium, and a farm, and asked viewers to report to local authorities. It did not say how rare the threat was or what a report led to. The 1942 sheets on this site, such as He's Watching You, asked for the same watchfulness in wartime. ## The press room and the pool At her first briefing of the second term, on 29 January 2025, press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced a front-row seat for what she called new media. Opening the room is defensible; the press is not a guild with a fixed membership. The next step was not the same kind of thing. On 11 February 2025 the White House barred Associated Press reporters from pool events because the agency kept writing "Gulf of Mexico" rather than "Gulf of America," the name an executive order of 20 January 2025 had set. On 25 February the White House took over choosing the pool from the White House Correspondents' Association. The AP sued under the First Amendment. Judge Trevor McFadden ordered the restrictions lifted on 8 April 2025 and stayed his own order. On 6 June 2025 a divided appeals panel let the exclusion from small spaces such as the Oval Office stand and restored access to the East Room. The archive reports the case as still pending. The libertarian reading of an open case is not hard here: access handed out according to which word a newsroom uses is access conditioned on viewpoint. A government that may rename a body of water for its own documents may not make the new name a test for the reporters who cover it. ## Labels laid on people On 11 June 2025 Homeland Security posted an Uncle Sam figure in a 1940s poster style over the words "Report all foreign invaders" and an ICE tip-line number. The borrowed format is the same one Flagg used in I Want You for U.S. Army, and the request is the one the 1918 "Spies and Lies" advertisement made on the Wilson page: report your neighbors. "Invader" is a war word for a person who crossed a border without authorization. In October 2025 a White House graphic laid the single word CRIMINALS over a grid of unnamed faces, under the line "Criminal Aliens Receiving Taxpayer-funded Medicaid." The archive notes that the inset portraits are uncredited and their origin unverified. Enforcing immigration law is a lawful job of the executive. A one-word verdict printed over faces that the page does not name, tied to no stated case, is not enforcement; it is a label applied ahead of any process. Due process means a charge is proved about a person before the person is called guilty, and the government is the party that has to keep to that rule most strictly. ## Government and the platforms, in both directions On 20 February 2025 the Federal Trade Commission opened an inquiry into what it called tech censorship. This inquiry will help the FTC better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds. Andrew Ferguson, FTC chairman, press release of 20 February 2025. As quoted on the FRAME Trump administration page. The stated aim is to protect speakers. The method is a federal regulator examining how private companies edit their own services. That is the same structural problem this site found in the 2022 Homeland Security board, pointed the other way. If a government office asking platforms about "disinformation" was a threat to speech then, an office asking them about "censorship" needs the same limits now. On 29 June 2026 the Supreme Court held 6 to 3 in Trump v. Slaughter that FTC commissioners may be removed at will, overruling Humphrey's Executor (1935). Whatever one thinks of that separation-of-powers ruling, it means the agency running this inquiry now answers more directly to the president. The archive also records the FCC chairman's remarks of September 2025 about a late-night program, and the question whether they amounted to pressure on a broadcaster, in its jawboning study. In the other direction, the State Department closed its counter-disinformation office, R/FIMI, on 16 April 2025; the archive covers it in its study of the Global Engagement Center. A libertarian can read that closure as a government stepping back from grading speech. The record here does not say what, if anything, replaced it. ## Names by order Executive Order 14347 of 5 September 2025 let the Secretary of Defense use the secondary title "Secretary of War" in correspondence, public statements, and ceremonies, and let the department be called the Department of War in those settings. The same order says the statutory names stay controlling until Congress changes them. The order is candid about its own limit. A rename in the president's documents is speech by the government; the law is still what Congress wrote. The "Gulf of America" order of 20 January 2025 is the same kind of act, and it became a press-access fight only when the White House made it one. The archive's most recent object from this administration is the title card of a Martí Noticias newscast of 10 June 2026, from the Office of Cuba Broadcasting in the U.S. Agency for Global Media. It is a government broadcaster aimed at a foreign audience, as such services have been since the Roosevelt years. The frame shows a brand and a web address and makes no claim of its own. ## Reading it at this date On one side of the record: two elections won and one lost, a lost election contested in court and the office still handed over on schedule, a press that sued and a court that heard it, and a ruling that a president may not block critics from his own public account. On the other: a lost election called a fraud after the courts said otherwise, a news agency's access tied to its choice of a word, an official account built to attack the press, federal reports that argue one side at public expense, and government posters that call people invaders and criminals before any case is stated. This page will be revised as the term goes on. The roster and the cases cited are as of the FRAME snapshot of 29 September 2026. ## Sources - Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, No. 18-1691 (2d Cir. 9 July 2019); Associated Press v. Budowich (D.D.C. and D.C. Cir., 2025); Trump v. Slaughter (U.S. 29 June 2026), as reported by SCOTUSblog. - Executive Order 14347 (5 September 2025); White House press briefing of 29 January 2025; White House cabinet page, read 29 September 2026. - Remarks and exchange with reporters, New York City, 15 August 2017, American Presidency Project. - Federal Trade Commission, press release of 20 February 2025; Fox News on Rapid Response 47 (January 2025); CNN on the Attorney General's departure (2 April 2026). - FRAME object records: Council of Economic Advisers executive summary (December 2019); OSTP highlights quotation page (October 2020); White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy procurement chart (2 October 2020); Council on Environmental Quality overview (January 2021); DHS "Recognize the Signs" poster (2018); President's Coronavirus Guidelines mailer (16 March 2020); CDC "We Can Do It!" poster (21 December 2020); DHS "Report all foreign invaders" post (11 June 2025); White House "Criminals" graphic (October 2025); Martí Noticias title card (10 June 2026). - FRAME, Trump administration, for the chronology, the roster as of 29 September 2026, the quotations as cited, and the portrait credit; FRAME case studies on platform jawboning and the Global Engagement Center. Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/regimes/trump-administration/