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WASHINGTON: The White House stenographers have a problem. Donald Trump is talking so much, the people responsible for transcribing his public remarks are struggling to keep up with all the words.
There were more than 22,000 on Inauguration Day, then another 17,000 when Trump visited disaster sites in North Carolina and California. It’s enough to strain the ears and fingers of even the most dedicated stenographer, especially after four years of Joe Biden’s relative quiet.
Now there are discussions about hiring additional staff to keep up with the workload, according to people with knowledge of the conversations who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal matters.
The flood of words is one of the most visible — or audible — shifts from Biden to Trump, who craves the spotlight and understands better than most politicians that attention is a form of power. He’s been speaking nearly nonstop since starting his second term, drowning out dissenting voices and leaving his opponents struggling to be heard.
Take Wednesday, for example. During a signing ceremony for legislation to accelerate deportations, Trump, a Republican, talked up his accomplishments, claimed Hamas was using US-funded condoms to make bombs in Gaza, defended his administration’s efforts to freeze federal spending and reduce the government workforce, veered through descriptions of migrant violence and made the surprise announcement that Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, would be used as a detention center for people who are in the US illegally.
Trump’s commentary remains laden with falsehoods, including baseless allegations about voter fraud and assertions that California water policies worsened the recent wildfires. Sometimes he speaks off the cuff about consequential geopolitical matters, such as a recent suggestion that Palestinians should be displaced from Gaza while the enclave is rebuilt. It can be hard to know when to take him seriously, like when he muses about serving a third term, which the US Constitution does not allow.
But now that Trump is back in the presidency, it’s hard to ignore him.
“He’s dictating the news on his terms,” said Michael LaRosa, who worked as a television producer before serving as a spokesperson for former first lady Jill Biden. “He’s become America’s assignment editor.”

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, a Democrat, spent 2 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 7 hours and 44 minutes and 81,235 words last week. That’s longer than watching the original “Star Wars” trilogy back-to-back-to-back, and 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 3 hours and 41 minutes and spoke 33,571 words.
Trump has spent decades practicing 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.”
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, Trump presented a tour de force of talking, demonstrating that he’s far more willing to put himself in unscripted situations than Biden was.
He spoke with 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 over 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 Center 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 Sens. 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 helps keep his adversaries off balance.
“By doing so much and saying so much, it is hard for people who oppose him to organize,” 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.”

WASHINGTON: Conspiracy theories about vaccines. Secret meetings with dictators. An enemies list.
President Donald Trump’ s most controversial Cabinet nominees — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel — flooded the zone Thursday in back-to-back-to-back confirmation hearings that were like nothing the Senate has seen in modern memory.
The onslaught of claims, promises and testy exchanges did not occur in a political vacuum. The whirlwind day — Day 10 of the new White House — all unfolded as Trump himself was ranting about how diversity hiring caused the tragic airplane-and-helicopter crash outside Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport.
And it capped a tumultuous week after the White House abruptly halted federal funding for programs Americans rely on nationwide, under guidance from Trump’s budget pick Russ Vought, only to reverse course amid a public revolt.
“The American people did not vote for this kind of senseless chaos,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, earlier.
It was all challenging even the most loyal Republicans who are being asked to confirm Trump’s Cabinet or face recriminations from an army of online foot-soldiers aggressively promoting the White House agenda. A majority vote, in the Senate which is led by Republicans 53-57, is needed for confirmation, leaving little room for dissent.
Here are some takeaways from the day:
Tulsi Gabbard defends her loyalty — and makes some inroads
Gabbard is seen as the most endangered of Trump’s picks, potentially lacking the votes even from Trump’s party for confirmation for Director of National Intelligence. But her hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee offered a roadmap toward confirmation.
It opened with the chairman, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, swatting back claims that Gabbard is a foreign “asset,” undercover for some other nation, presumably Russia. He said he reviewed some 300 pages of multiple FBI background checks and she’s “clean as a whistle.”
But Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the panel, questioned whether she could build the trust needed, at home and abroad, to do the job.
Gabbard, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, defended her loyalty to the US She dismissed GOP Sen. Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, when he asked whether Russia would “get a pass” from her.
“Senator, I’m offended by the question,” Gabbard responded.
Pressed on her secret 2017 trip to meet with then-Syrian President Bashir Assad, who has since been toppled by rebels and fled to Russia, she defended her work as diplomacy.
Gabbard may have made some inroads with one potentially skeptical Republican. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, asked whether Gabbard would recommend a pardon for Edward Snowden. The former government contractor was charged with espionage after leaking a trove of sensitive intelligence material, and fled to residency in Russia.
Gabbard, who has called Snowden a brave whistleblower, said it would not be her responsibility to “advocate for any actions related to Snowden.”
Picking up one notable endorsement, Gabbard was introduced by one of the Senate’s more influential voices on intelligence matters, Richard Burr, the retired Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pressed again on vaccine safety
Kennedy faced a second day of grilling to become Health and Human Services secretary, this time at the Senate Health committee, as senators probed his past views against vaccines and whether he would ban the abortion drug mifepristone.
But what skeptical Democratic senators have been driving at is whether Kennedy is trustworthy — if he holds fast to his past views or has shifted to new ones — echoing concerns raised by his cousin Caroline Kennedy that he is a charismatic “predator” hungry for power.
“You’ve spent your entire career undermining America’s vaccine program,” said Sen. Chris Murphy D-Connecticut “It just isn’t believable that when you become secretary you are going to become consistent with science.”
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, took the conversation in a different direction reading Kennedy’s comments about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in which he said in a social media post: “It’s hard to tell what is conspiracy and what isn’t.”
“Wow,” Kaine said.
Kennedy responded that his father, the late Robert F. Kennedy, told him that people in positions of power do lie.
But Kennedy’s longtime advocacy in the anti-vaccine community continued to dominate his hearings.
Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., choked back tears when she told Kennedy that his work caused grave harm by relitigating what is already “settled science” — rather than helping the country advance toward new treatments and answers in health care.
But Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, immediately shifted the mood saying his own sons are fans of the nominee and he thanked Kennedy for “bringing the light” particularly to a younger generation interested in his alternative views.
Pressed on whether he would ban the abortion drug mifepristone, Kennedy said it’s up to Trump.
“I will implement his policy.”
A combative Kash Patel spars with senators over his past
Kash Patel emerged as perhaps the most combative nominee in a testy hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee as the nominee to lead the FBI.
Confronted with his own past words, writings and public comments, Patel, a former Capitol Hill staffer turned Trump enthusiast, protested repeatedly that his views were being taken out of context as “unfair” smears.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, read aloud Patel’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election and another about his published “enemies list” that includes former Trump officials who have been critical of the president.
“’We’re going to come after you,’” she read him saying.
Patel dismissed her citations as “partial statement” and “false.”
Klobuchar, exasperated, told senators: “It’s his own words.”
Patel has stood by Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol and produced a version of the national anthem featuring Trump and the so-called J6 choir of defendants as a fundraiser. The president played the song opening his campaign rallies.
During one jarring moment, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., asked Patel to turn around and look at the US Capitol Police officers protecting the hearing room.
“Tell them you’re proud of what you did. Tell them you’re proud that you raised money off of people that assaulted their colleagues, that pepper sprayed them, that beat them with poles,” Schiff said.
Patel fired back: “That’s an abject lie, you know it. I never, never, ever accepted violence against law enforcement.”
Patel said he did not endorse Trump’s sweeping pardon of supporters, including violent rioters, charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
“I do not agree with the commutation of any sentence of any individual who committed violence against law enforcement,” Patel said.
In another Cabinet development, Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee advanced Trump’s budget nominee Russ Vought toward confirmation after Democrats boycotted the meeting in protest.
Vought was an architect of Project 2025 and influential in the White House memo to free federal funding this week, which sparked panic in communities across the country. Advocacy organizations challenged the freeze in court, and the White House quickly rescinded it, for now.