In This Trump Presidency, the Domination Will be Televised

There was a Caesar-at-the-Colosseum air to President Donald J. Trump’s appearance at this year’s Super Bowl, the first by a sitting president.

The leader of the state took his place in the grand arena — which figuratively included more than 127 million TV viewers — to preside over his people’s biggest event of gladiatorial combat. Fox cameras captured him saluting during the anthem, amid shots of service members and a military flyover, part of the increasingly martial pageant of the pregame ceremony.

He even had Super Bowl ads, of a sort: Spots for Fox News during the game repeatedly featured a photo of Mr. Trump raising a fist after the assassination attempt against him last summer.

Seeking the media spotlight is nothing new for Mr. Trump. But in his second term, there is already a pronounced trend in how he and his allies are using imagery with an almost imperial aesthetic to project an air of ubiquity, authority and invincibility.

On TV news and social media, his immigration-enforcement raids are being packaged like mini reality-TV shows — complete with perp walks and even guest stars — to flood viewers with images of relentless action. His signing ceremonies are playlets of theatrical conquest. Even in his inaugural portrait, where he smiled in 2017, he now scowls.

The Trump 2.0 penchant for dominance theater was evident from the inauguration, at the arena show where Mr. Trump basked in the cheers of a MAGA crowd as he signed executive orders at a makeshift presidential desk. The manner of the signing said just as much about Mr. Trump’s vision of leadership as the text of the orders did: the sole decider lifting his pen and ruling by decree.

All this stage-crafted vigor may have paid off for Mr. Trump in his early polling. Despite disagreements over specific actions and proposals, a majority of respondents to a recent CBS News poll described him as “tough,” “energetic” and “effective” — the natural offshoot of media images designed to convey that the maximum leader is everywhere, doing everything.

Maybe the most intense TV effort of the new administration, however, has been one that has not starred Mr. Trump at all: The P.R. program of embedding cameras with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies on immigration-enforcement raids. The busts and ride-alongs have involved local and national news reporters, as well as the former talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw.

“Clearly there was interest in having cameras present,” said CBS News’s Major Garrett after accompanying a raid in New York City. “Some call that performative law enforcement, others call it a way of spreading the message, creating deterrence.”

The videos have turned the administration’s signature initiative into a season of “Cops,” with all the propagandistic framing that implies. As on “Cops,” the targets are objects, not subjects. What we know of them is what law enforcement wants us to know about them. Whatever the arrestees say to the observers’ questions is presented as evidence against them, as is whatever they don’t say.

The resulting, visceral message, on government social-media feeds and nightly news, is of a tireless, muscular government springing into pursuit and getting a job done. On a local news station in North Carolina, an embed report on the pursuit of a man identified as a Honduran national captures a chase through the woods, a walk in front of the camera as the man is apprehended, a close shot of his shackled ankles as he is walked into an elevator at an I.C.E. field office.

There is plenty that the videos don’t tell us. The administration has given little information, for instance, about how many of the thousands of people captured in the raids were actually among the intended targets.

But the videos speak a visual language that decades of police procedurals and action shows, from “Dragnet” through today, have taught a TV audience to read. They depict agents — whose point-of-view we share — showing force and cleaning up the streets. In a debate between nuanced reporting and potent images, the pictures win every time.

Still, even a slick production has its limits. The immigration-raid videos and government handout images have been in heavy rotation on Fox News, and on Feb. 6 the channel aired a report on a raid in Colorado that failed to arrest any of the gang members it was said to target. “There’s no sugarcoating it; this operation fell short of what they were going for,” said the embedded Fox reporter, Bill Melugin.

The segment ended up turning into a platform for Mr. Trump’s “border czar,” Thomas Homan, to accuse leakers of tipping off the raid’s targets and threaten consequences. Interviewing Mr. Homan, the Fox anchor Harris Faulkner was aghast at footage of protesters using megaphones to inform arrest targets, in Spanish, of their rights. “If they’re shouting and helping these people get away with bullhorns, how is that legal?” she asked.

Not all coverage has been so accommodating, and the administration has noticed this as well. Also on Feb. 6, Mr. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, speaking on “Fox & Friends,” said the F.C.C. was investigating a San Francisco radio station for its live coverage of an immigration enforcement action, which Mr. Carr said had undermined the operation.

With this warning, there was again subtext along with the text, this time aimed at the press: A relentless, formidable Trump administration was watching, was listening and would not be stopped. The show — through punitive force if necessary — would go on.