When the president of the United States posted a video on the social media platform he owns while most Americans were asleep Saturday, he conveyed two messages. The first was that America and Israel had begun military operations in Iran. The second was that he didn’t need the pomp and circumstance of an Oval Office address to share the news.
The military strikes set off serious debate about whether the action was justified, what the goals are and how it fits into Trump’s “America First” agenda. But Trump’s unconventional way of delivering the news — wearing a ball cap in a video posted to Truth Social — also spurred conversation among observers who thought more gravitas was required.
“We need something more than a midnight video from a guy in a hat telling us everything’s going to be awesome,” The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols said on MS NOW (formerly MSNBC). And Trump opponents pointed out that the president had spoken from the Oval Office after Charlie Kirk was assassinated last fall.
There was a practical reason for the Truth Social video, however, as well as a strategic one. Trump was at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, not in D.C.
And while a piece in Columbia Journalism Review decried the announcement coming from “a platform he owns and uses for fleeting thoughts, administration propaganda, and policy announcements,” Trump’s use of Truth Social is a form of trolling legacy media outlets, which are compelled to promote the platform while sharing news that breaks there.
It’s also the president serving up evidence that the old guard of media that he regularly denounces has been diminished by the new and evolving.
Trump supporters point out that, even as many people cringe from his casual language (such as saying, “That’s the way it is. Likely be more,” about American deaths), the president has been accessible and loquacious in the past two days, reportedly even answering calls from reporters on his cellphone.
Would the public be better served by a press conference and Oval Office address? The optics would have been better, for sure.
But nearly 16 years ago, when Barack Obama was president, The New York Times published an article about Oval Office addresses, detailing how their frequency was declining. The article noted that “For many baby boomers in particular, the speeches define the historical timeline of their lives.”
But that is not true for younger generations, who consume news much differently than Americans did in 1947, when Harry Truman gave the first nationally televised address from the White House, urging Americans to conserve food in order to help Europe.
Their habits have changed even more since the Obama presidency. According to 2025 data from Pew Research Center, “Adults under 30 are much more likely to get news on social media than older adults. There is a 48 percentage point gap between the shares of Americans ages 18 to 29 and those 65 and older who get news on social media at least sometimes (76% vs. 28%).”
There’s a video from the Jimmy Kimmel show that floats around social media showing the differences between Obama and Trump delivering the news about a military action that resulted in death. (The Washington Post did a much more serious analysis of the two men’s differing styles.)
Mercifully, this weekend, there was no Kimmelized Trump. The president’s remarks about Iran were serious in tone. The baseball cap he wore while announcing the action said simply “America,” not the partisan slogan “Make America Great Again.”
It was Trumpian gravitas, which, for sure, can leave Americans longing for Reagan gravitas or Obama gravitas, and wishing the president wasn’t talking about statues, ballrooms and Iranian unemployment while the operation is still in its earliest stages.
Seriousness of purpose is not proven or disproven by venue, and Trump was elected, in part, because he eschewed traditional media for new forms of communication. He is being called “the most consequential president of our lifetime” just one year into his second term. His supporters say, “Let Trump be Trump,” and he himself says that another, more conventional president couldn’t do what he does. There’s truth in that.
There’s also truth in the idea that lethal military operations, no matter the purpose, ought not be announced on social media in the middle of the night.