“He loves doing them,” said Cliff Sims, a West Wing staffer who oversees the taped 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.”

With President Trump at the microphone, the weekly addresses have become surprise online blockbusters — with record numbers of Internet viewers.

WASHINGTON — The weekly presidential address, a White House ritual since the days of Ronald Reagan, has rarely risen beyond dull routine. It got a video makeover in more recent years, but even that did little to lift its ratings — until recently.


The average audience for Trump’s first 15 weekly addresses was 1.7 million views. That’s more than three times the average viewership Barack Obama received in the same time period last year, according to a Globe analysis of publicly available data.

As Trump navigates many unfamiliar rituals of politics, the weekly address represents one of the few areas that he’s familiar with: making a television show. For a president who likes to focus on the salesman-in-chief aspect of the job, it offers a moment to circumvent the national news media and pitch a message directly to his core supporters. What’s more, he has a savvy digital team that knows how to get that message to his eager followers on social media.

But staffers acknowledge that people tune in to Trump for the same reason they watch him on TV: You never really know what’s going to come out of his mouth.

So far, Trump’s biggest hit has been the first address, which generated more than 7 million views on YouTube and Facebook. He starts with a formal greeting — “My fellow Americans” — and then, straight to camera, ticks off his early accomplishments, along with some Trumpian boasting.


“This administration has hit the ground running at a record pace. Everybody is talking about it,” Trump said in his initial address.

Unlike in his tweets and at rallies, Trump avoids taking swipes at the media, Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, House Republicans, federal judges, the disabled, Obama, and other targets that fill his Twitter feed.

Viewers can clearly see his eyes shifting back and forth as he reads from a prepared script on a teleprompter. This is a bit of a letdown for some of his supporters, who nevertheless faithfully tune in online.

“I listen to it out of respect,” said Jack Smith, a 60-year-old retired salesman in Nevada who regularly views the addresses but pines for the Trump he saw at the two rallies he attended in his state during the campaign.

“I listen to them as a barometer, to see how he is bending to political pressure, so I can either increase my support or decrease my support,” Smith said. “I’m watching. I don’t want to be blind.”

The president’s staff is brainstorming ways to make the addresses more engaging. Ideas include having Trump respond to a letter or a person who has commented in the past (watch out Jack Smith, that could be you); taping them before a live audience (maybe in the East Room); and ditching the teleprompter and providing just bullet points for Trump to riff on.

“You put him in front of a teleprompter, and that magic evaporates,” said one White House staffer familiar with the addresses.


Some in the White House are open to ending the weekly address altogether if the viewership drops, or taping them less regularly. They aim for at least one million views each week, a goal surpassed in seven of the 15 addresses.

“The president likes to upend things,” said one person familiar with the addresses.

Trump, who kept his executive producer credit on NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice” after winning the election, gets personally involved with some of the details. He offers specific ideas about camera angles and lighting — and during the initial few tapings offered extensive feedback to the career staff who operate the cameras and lights.

Each week, Democrats faithfully offer a rebuttal of sorts with their own videotaped address. (Under Obama the Republicans did this, too.) The job of delivering an opposition message rotates between Democrats in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

These are not as popular.

An early video recorded by the House’s Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, received a paltry 2,273 views on YouTube. (Her staff has since gotten more sophisticated at uploading the videos more effectively to social media, and subsequent messages by other members promoted on her Facebook page reached into the tens of thousands of views.)

“It’s a tradition, and it’s an opportunity. We’re not going to turn down a messaging opportunity,” said Drew Hammill, Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff. “Our members enjoy doing them. They do.”


The broadcasts are picked up by local radio stations and some TV outlets. Quotes from them are often incorporated into the weekend press coverage of Washington.

The tradition has distant roots in the “fireside chats” of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who spoke directly via radio to an anxious nation about the recovery from the Great Depression and the couse of World War II. The modern White House version of the weekly address tradition began in 1982 with a different Republican celebrity turned politician, Reagan, who delivered every Saturday morning.

George H.W. Bush didn’t like the tradition and dropped it.

But Bill Clinton, another salesman-in-chief, revived the idea. Famously long-winded, his addresses began to stretch to 10 minutes long, which prompted some radio stations to drop the broadcast.

George W. Bush added his own innovation: offering the address as an early podcast.

When Obama took office, the telegenic young president decided to do videos for the YouTube audience (though some television shows do broadcast the messages). But some of his former staff acknowledged the productions could have been more engaging.

“There is something to upping the showmanship to make them more interesting,” said Arun Chaudhary, who was Obama’s videographer and convinced the president to change the format to video.

Chaudhary said the taped addresses were Obama’s least favorite thing to do each week. It was the last item on his schedule on Friday evenings — the final task before he would have time with his family or to read. And sometimes, making matters worse, Obama had to tape two versions of the address, because the staff was unclear on what the result would be of a particular vote.


“He felt like trying to make this thing perfect and glossy wasn’t worth his time,” Chaudhary said. “Obama felt the tug of other things to do that Trump doesn’t feel.”

Yet the 44th president also felt that he couldn’t just halt the practice. As Chaudhary explained: “You start doing something, and you can’t stop.”

Annie Linskey can be reached at annie.linskey@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @annielinskey.