WASHINGTON—Donald Trump is hiding in plain sight.

Trump is everywhere, dominating the news cycle and the public conversation. And Trump is nowhere, establishing this omnipresence from the safety of a protective bubble.

The president is communicating almost exclusively through daily blasts on Twitter and sporadic interviews with fawning hosts on Fox News. In neither forum does he have to deal with difficult questions.

He has abandoned the tradition of taking questions while appearing with visiting foreign leaders and at foreign conferences such as this week’s G20. He has done far fewer solo news conferences — just one — than his three predecessors: Barack Obama six as of late June, George W. Bush three, Bill Clinton seven.

As of Wednesday, he had done just over half as many interviews (44) as Obama (78) at the same point, according to CBS News journalist Mark Knoller. And Trump’s pace is slowing over time: He did no interviews at all over a 41-day stretch that ended with a late June lovefest on Fox & Friends.

When Trump does speak, whether he is on a trip abroad or on his iPhone, his focus is the very media he is shunning. According to a late June count by CNN, the network he derides as “fake news,” he had spent 85 tweets attacking the press; 67 mention jobs.

Much of his communicating appears more impulsive than strategic. To the extent he is thinking before he speaks, he is executing a strategy that Republican communicators say is aimed entirely at his own voter base.

Matters like transparency and accountability aside, there are clear advantages to his approach.

By speaking solely through Twitter and Fox, he gets his deceitful messages to his supporters without the inconvenience of fact-checking. By submitting to conversations with only conservatives, he avoids gaffes even when he is unprepared, as is so often the case.

And by picking fights with outlets many Republicans distrust, he creates a useful enemy, distracting from his governing struggles and undermining future scoops while firing up supporters who see him as a fighter taking aim at liberal elites.

“I think one of the things they like about him is he doesn’t let the press walk all over him, he doesn’t let bygones be bygones, he kind of continues to fight. And right or wrong, agree or disagree, he is turning the tables a bit,” said Jason Killian Meath, a Republican media strategist.

“He has thrown the rule book on how to engage with the press out the window. It’s done. He’s doing this to a media who largely are hostile to him, and it’s driving them crazy.”

Trump’s attacks have produced periodic bouts of hand-wringing among reporters and editors. The self-criticism hit another crescendo this past week, after some outlets devoted heavy coverage to Trump’s decision to tweet an image of him as a pro wrestler body-slamming CNN.

Washington Post journalist Dave Weigel wrote on Twitter: “Unpopular take: We in media need to ignore some of these Trump attacks on the press. The strategy is to start dumb fights, not ban us.” Wrote Kyle Pope, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review: “We have reached the point at which the media response has become counterproductive and even beneficial to the president and his lackeys in the White House.”

Yet there is far from a consensus, even among Republicans unsympathetic to the media, that Trump’s strategy is helping him on the whole.

Trump’s base is solid, but it is small: His approval rating is hovering just below 40 per cent, a dreadful plateau. Terry Holt, a former spokesperson for George W. Bush’s campaigns and former House speaker John Boehner, said Trump is impeding his own agenda by shunning the news outlets and the policy messages that might allow him to widen his support.

“Those 35 to 38 per cent of the American people who support Donald Trump are going to support him almost under any circumstances . . . but the Congress has to work with a broader range of people,” Holt said. “And so even though Trump sees the power of the media only in communicating his base, that still leaves him 12 or 13 points short of a majority. That weakens his presidency. And it weakens the ability of his policy partners to go along with what he wants to do, or to pass legislation that is more popular than the president.”

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Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based Republican strategist, said Trump will harm Republican candidates in the 2018 congressional elections if he maintains his “insufficient” strategy of speaking to just a third of the public rather than trying to “put a coalition together that is certainly in the mid-40s and ideally is a majority.”

Media-bashing, he said, “doesn’t necessarily convince people that you’re delivering on your promises, that you’re making their life better.”

“The thing that concerns me, even though I probably agree strongly with 80 per cent of what they’re trying to accomplish, is I don’t see them going out and trying to persuade the country,” Mackowiak said.

Indeed, the popular theory that Trump uses media criticism to take attention away from harmful subjects ignores the frequent effect of the criticism: drawing attention to other harmful subjects at the expense of whatever substantive matter his aides are trying to rope him into discussing.

Trump attacked MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski last week for her intelligence and appearance, spurring another discussion of his history of sexism, during what was supposed to be the White House’s “Energy Week” — and on a day he could have been crowing about his travel ban going into effect or the House voting to get tougher on illegal immigrants.

“There have been examples in this administration where legitimate news was made, but then the anger or outrage over certain reports by media overshadowed that news,” Holt said. “Rule No. 1: never step on your own story. And that’s happened quite a lot.”

Polls do not support the notion that Trump is a communications mastermind. In a Fox News poll last week, 71 per cent said his tweets hurt his agenda; just 21 per cent of Republicans said they approve of his tweeting. In a Politico poll, Trump’s mockery of Brzezinski was endorsed by just 28 per cent of Republicans and 16 per cent overall.

Meath dismissed the argument that Trump should stick to policy messages and give his time to traditional news outlets. An anti-Trump press corps, he said, is never going to devote substantial, impartial coverage to his energy plans.

But Meath was not willing to go so far as to proclaim Trump’s actual strategy a good idea.

“I think we’re writing a new rule book, and we don’t know the answer to that question yet,” he said. “I think we’re watching history get rewritten.”

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