The most transparent administration in history.
President Donald Trump has sharply increased his press engagement in the first year of his second term, logging at least 493 exchanges with journalists through Jan. 20, according to figures compiled by political scientist Martha Kumar and shared with The New York Post.
The count compares with 246 exchanges during the first 365 days of Trump’s first term, according to the same dataset. The new tally includes 153 interviews (up from 95), 327 short question-and-answer sessions (up from 128), and 13 formal press conferences (down from 23).
Kumar, a professor emerita at Towson University and director of the White House Transition Project, said the increase reflects Trump returning to office with clearer policy priorities and a more deliberate approach to message discipline.
“One of the reasons that [press engagement] doubled is that he came in with a much clearer agenda to discuss than he had in his first term,” she told the Post. “A benefit of having non-consecutive terms is that he could think not only about the agenda he wanted to have, but how to present it.”
Trump averaged more than two media sessions per workday, outpacing President Joe Biden’s first-year rate of 1.1 per day and exceeding the early-term averages cited for Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, among others, according to Kumar’s tracking.
Much of Trump’s second-term engagement has come through informal, unscheduled interactions, including impromptu conversations that begin when reporters call his cellphone—an access point Kumar said is unusual compared with prior administrations.
The dataset also shows a rise in on-the-move press encounters: Trump took questions on or near Air Force One 73 times in his first year back in office, more than quadrupling Biden’s 17 such interactions, the Post reported.
Trump has also leaned heavily on the Oval Office for media availabilities, answering questions at 95 Oval Office events in the first year of his second term—far above comparable early-year totals logged for Biden and Trump’s first term, and higher than any president tracked by Kumar since at least the early 1980s.
Kumar argued the format itself draws coverage because it pairs visuals with policy action. “When you’re signing executive orders, that’s action, and news organizations and the public are drawn to action,” she told the Post.
The Post said widely watched Oval Office appearances have included meetings with pharmaceutical executives, a contentious exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and a notably cordial sit-down with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani—an encounter local reporting also described as unexpectedly friendly.
More over at The New York Post:
Trump nears 500 press interactions in second term, blowing past Biden, data show https://t.co/QFAffX6bXt pic.twitter.com/G4ROsIF410
— New York Post (@nypost) February 9, 2026
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