Guest Post: Joshua Scacco and Kevin Coe on their new book, The Ubiquitous Presidency

When then-candidate Joe Biden exclaimed via tweet in July 2020 that “You won't have to worry about my tweets when I'm president,” people knew exactly what he meant. Biden’s remark reflected a widely shared concern about the trajectory of presidential communication in the administration of Donald Trump, with Trump’s unwieldy and often cruel tweets the most obvious indicator. But focusing only on Trump obscures the broader transformation that US presidential communication is undergoing. Many fundamental changes to presidential public outreach predate Trump and will continue long after Biden. Our new book, The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times, documents and explain these changes.

The Ubiquitous Presidency is the latest addition to the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series. The book explores the historical and contemporary evolution of presidential communication practices, presents a framework for researchers and readers to make sense of past and future strategic messaging from the White House, assesses media coverage and public attitudes toward changes in presidential outreach, and offers a set of ways that key institutional and individual actors (e.g., government leaders, journalists, social media companies, citizens) can hold presidents accountable for their words.

At its core, the “ubiquitous presidency” is a way of explaining the contemporary presidency, especially the significant changes it has undergone over the past several decades. The term ubiquity signals that contemporary presidents create a nearly constant and highly visible communicative presence in political and nonpolitical arenas through the use of mass as well as targeted media. They do this to achieve longstanding goals of visibility, adaptation, and control. But, in a socio-technological environment where accessibility, personalization, and pluralism are omnipresent considerations, the strategies presidents use to achieve these goals are very different from what we once knew. The Ubiquitous Presidency is thus an important explainer for trajectories in strategic communication and leadership from political elites. Ubiquity is not just a means to an end—in some cases, it is the end itself.

To unpack the striking changes in presidential outreach, and the turbulence these changes have engendered, we explore broad trends across presidencies and specific instances to help situate presidential actions within the contexts of accessibility, personalization, and pluralism. Accessibility has created an expectation that presidents meet audiences where they are at, which is often in spaces that are not traditionally political, and that presidents provide the possibility for interaction while they are there. The growth of personalization has meant that presidents increasingly engage in more informal and disclosive communication, easing the boundaries that exist between the public and the private. Pluralism has led to a more diverse populace and political system. Different presidents in different moments have embraced or challenged this new reality.

The book focuses directly on governance in a digital democracy. Whereas much of the research on political leadership in the present moment attends to campaigns and social movements, governance is an especially enduring and consequential context amid heightened political polarization and dramatic changes to the information environment. To ground the book’s claims, we rely on a wide range of materials, including thousands of presidential communications and media texts (analyzed via manual and computer-assisted quantitative content analysis, as well as qualitative textual analysis), massive Twitter data sets, national and regional survey data, and a national survey experiment. Triangulating quantitative and qualitative data, the evidence uncovers many trends and moments that have formed the ubiquitous presidency.

Our focus in most of the book is the presidency since Ronald Reagan, with presidents since Bill Clinton playing particularly important roles in the emergence of the ubiquitous presidency. We also devote a full chapter each to the two men who most embody the ubiquitous presidency thus far: Barack Obama and Donald Trump. For Obama, we look at how he drove attention to his presidency online, implemented a novel form of political reality television in a weekly web series called West Wing Week, and advocated for the Affordable Care Act in ways that led to considerable press adoption of his language. For Trump, we uncover his administration’s various attempts at communicative control, his messaging strategy as he attempted to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, and his dangerous use of digital incitement as a means of creating a discursive army eager to attack those with whom he disagreed.

The book culminates with a discussion of accountability. Political, technological, journalist, and citizen agents all play a vital role in clipping presidential communication to fit the contours of democratic discourse, and holding presidents to account when their communication runs the risk of damaging democracy. Such accountability is all the more urgent in light of Trump’s impeachment in January by the U.S. House of Representatives for “incitement of insurrection.” Specifically, the article of impeachment charged that Trump “willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged—and foreseeably resulted in—lawless action at the Capitol.” Trump’s communication was scrutinized by Congress and de-platformed by major social media companies. Such actions are crucial given the president’s ability to command attention. This is an ability that, given the rise of the ubiquitous presidency, has never been more evident—or more consequential.

The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times, by Joshua Scacco and Kevin Coe, is now available from Oxford University Press.