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Donald Trump talks so much even his stenographers are struggling to keep up

Most presidents try to start their terms with a bang, seizing the moment when their influence could be at its peak. However, Trump is in a different league.

Biden spent two hours and 36 minutes talking on camera and used 24,259 words in his first week in office four years ago, according to numbers generated by Factba.se.

Trump’s comparable stats: nearly seven hours and 44 minutes and 81,235 words last week. That’s more words than Macbeth, Hamlet and Richard III combined.

It’s also much more than when Trump took office for his first term eight years ago. Back then, he was only on camera talking for three hours and 41 minutes and spoke 33,571 words.

Trump has spent decades practising the best ways to get people to pay attention to him. As a New York businessman, he fed stories to gossip columnists, added gold plating to buildings and slapped his name on every product that he sold. His efforts reached an apex with The Apprentice, the reality television show that beamed him into American living rooms.

“One of the things that has given him the advantage is that he thinks like an executive producer,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican communications strategist. “He’s constantly programming the next hour and trying to keep his audience engaged.”

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A sign of what was to come arrived shortly after Trump was sworn in. He delivered an inaugural address and then promptly gave more remarks to supporters that were even longer than his speech. And then he spoke at a downtown arena, where people had gathered for a rally, and later he parried questions from reporters for nearly an hour in the Oval Office while signing executive orders.

At one point, he turned to Fox News Channel’s Peter Doocy.

“Does Biden ever do news conferences like this?” Trump said. “How many news conferences, Peter, has he done like this?”

“Like this?” Doocy responded.

“None,” Trump said, answering his own question.

On Friday last week, Trump presented a tour de force of talking, demonstrating that he’s far more willing to put himself in unscripted situations than Biden was.

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He spoke to reporters while leaving the White House in the morning. He talked to them again after landing in North Carolina, then again at a briefing on the recovery from Hurricane Helene, and then again while meeting with victims of the storm.

Trump flew that afternoon to Los Angeles, where he conversed with local officials about the recent wildfires. Before boarding Air Force One to leave the city in the evening, he answered more questions from reporters on the tarmac.

As his travels continued at the weekend, Trump spoke to reporters twice at the back of Air Force One – as often as Biden did for his entire term.

“Transparency is back!” wrote longtime aide Margo Martin on social media.

That’s not the word that Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Centre at the University of Pennsylvania, would use.

“Being accessible and being transparent are two different things,” she said.

Sometimes more talking doesn’t produce more clarity. One afternoon, Trump told reporters that there were “no surprises” when Republican senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski decided to oppose Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon. The next morning, Trump said he was “very surprised” by their votes.

Jamieson worries that the frenzied pace will exhaust people.

“More people will simply check out,” she said. “And that’s a problem. An informed citizenry is an engaged citizenry.”

Kate Berner, who worked on Biden’s communications staff, said Trump’s constant talking helped keep his adversaries off balance.

“By doing so much and saying so much, it is hard for people who oppose him to organise,” she said. “And it is hard for any one thing to take hold.”

But there’s also a risk for Trump, Berner said. If he’s not careful, she said, he could once again start “wearing out his welcome with the American people”.

AP

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