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The Bodycam Presidency 

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April 12, 2025

The Bodycam Presidency

Since 2016, Donald Trump has gone from novice outsider to one of the most skilled politicians America has seen in a very long time.

by Tim O'Brien
AmericanThinker.com

Michigan governor and would-be 2028 presidential hopeful Gretchen Whitmer angered fellow Democrats on April 9th when she travelled to the White House as scheduled to meet privately with President Trump. The presumptive purpose for the meeting was to discuss tariffs and other Michigan-related matters.

That’s not how it turned out, however. It wasn’t a private meeting at all. Instead, Whitmer was forced to the periphery of the Oval Office as the president signed executive orders and presided over one of his now routine media scrums. While he did squeeze in some conversation in with Whitmer, along with some gracious praise of her, you don’t have to be a body language expert to sense her obvious discomfort with the whole situation. She knew how this sort of impromptu photo op would play to her base.

In his first term, President Trump might have invited someone like Whitmer to his office and actually had that private meeting, allowing her to leave and later reframe her own version of it all for the media, setting the narrative regardless of Trump’s version of events.

If nothing else, Trump has proven to be a quick study. Since 2016, he has gone from novice outsider to one of the most skilled politicians America has seen in a very long time. So much so, that he’s playing the game at a level no one has imagined.

Trump knows what life is like lived in a fish bowl. He’s used to it. He’s comfortable with it. He thrives on it. But if he made any mistakes in his first term, it was trust some of the wrong people, and perhaps more importantly, to trust existing processes. He underestimated just how corrupt the system is, and in due course, he exposed it.

The price he paid for this was to have to endure the damaging Charlottesville “fine people” hoax, the “Russia Russia” hoax, two politically contrived impeachments, among other forms of political sabotage. All of which were designed to distract and derail his presidency.

In 2025, solidly into his second term, it’s clear that Trump has decided to change the process. A big part of this is to bring a level of transparency to the Oval Office which has never been seen. Call it the “bodycam presidency.”

The Lessons of Bodycams

In recent years, there has been a push among criminal justice advocacy organizations to make police more accountable by mandating that they wear body cameras while on duty. Defense attorneys felt that such bodycam footage would help their cases where they had hoped to catch police red-handed in excessive use of force, or in violation of police procedure and the law.

According to the National Institute of Justice, at least one-third of municipal police departments require body-worn cameras on their police officers. While there are numerous studies on their effectiveness to various results, the consensus is that police bodycams improve accountability for both officer and suspect. More often, rather than catching police in the act of some impropriety, the cameras have proven to be a valuable tool in law enforcement giving prosecutors better evidence at trial.

Transparency Protects Some, Exposes Others

These same dynamics apply to the Trump transparency strategy. The more the president conducts business in front of the media, he’s not only making himself more accountable, but he’s doing the same with everyone he meets. As Whitmer seemed to make clear, this can cause a certain level of discomfort for those not used to this level of transparency.

But Trump doesn’t limit such treatment only to political rivals or Democrats. The day before Trump met with Whitmer, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu received the same treatment in his own meeting with Trump.

While it’s obvious the two men share a very close political relationship, Trump still appeared to spring new information on Netanyahu in full view of the cameras at the White House. He appeared to tell the media and Netanyahu almost simultaneously that the U.S. would keep certain tariffs in place on Israel.

In February, when the two men met, Trump seemed to visibly surprise Netanyahu with his own vision for peace in Gaza and U.S. involvement.

As much as Trump criticizes the media and frames them as “fake news,” he uses them more skillfully than most. He’s mastered the art of negotiating through the media, and compelling the media to cover things they normally would rather bury. He’s used his accessibility to the media to take away their own plausible deniability. Media “fact checkers” can try to twist the facts as much as they want, but with Trump Presidency 2.0 there’s almost always a video record of what he actually said or did. For the people who meet with him, he’s practically removed the opportunity for those who might try to recharacterize what they talked about, or what Trump may have said to them.

In conducting the vast majority of presidential business under lights and in front of cameras, it’s tempting to conclude that it’s just Trump being the ultimate showman. But the strategic advantage this gives him is that he’s creating a verifiable, undeniable public record on certain matters that simply cannot be disputed at some later date.

The strategic objective appears to be to protect himself, his administration, and his agenda, while possibly exposing anyone who might dare to reframe their interactions with him later.

Like those police who wear bodycams, the president knows that through increased transparency he can better minimize the chances for future baseless allegations from those who might try to sink his presidency.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/the_bodycam_presidency.html

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