ABSTRACT
The presidency of Donald Trump is surely the most highly mediatised presidency that has ever existed in the United States. The standard narrative about the mediatisation of politics certainly applies to the rise of populist leaders like Trump. Nevertheless, patterns of media use and trust in media have definitely become politicised in the US in ways they were not for many decades, from about the mid-twentieth century. Media technologies are understood in the broad sense since something like social media, for example, is obviously not simply a kind of hardware, but a set of communicative practices afforded by the infrastructure of networked digital communication. The shift from party democracy to new, more mediated forms of politics is influenced by the rise of television and of commercial media generally. Television journalists responded to new forms of image-making and media manipulation, initiated in the political sphere, by moving in the direction of more active and often critical reporting of campaigns.
