Meet YouTube’s biggest new star: President Trump
WASHINGTON — Once a week Donald Trump participates in an unheralded White House tradition that lets him circumvent the national press corps he claims to loathe and beam his words directly to supporters.
The weekly presidential address is roughly five minutes of the president sitting before microphones in a fairly dull routine that most presidents have recorded in some form since Ronald Reagan’s days when it began on radio. Today’s videos have the feel of a low-budget cable access show. Under Trump, however, they’ve become surprise online blockbusters — with record numbers of Internet viewers.
“He loves doing them,” said Cliff Sims, a West Wing staffer who oversees the address and meets the president each week, often first thing in the morning, with a leather-bound folder containing the script. “The most powerful weapon we have in our communications arsenal is President Trump speaking directly to the American people.”
The average audience for Trump’s first 15 weekly addresses was 1.7 million views. That’s more than three times as big as the average viewership Obama received in the same time period last year, according to a Globe analysis of publicly available data.
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