‘You don’t want to live inside his head’: diplomats’ dilemma in the age of Trump

How does one keep tabs on, and then interpret, a president who in a single year sent out more than 6,000 social media posts, conducted more than 433 open press events and held free-associating press conferences lasting close to two hours? The White House Stenographer’s Office calculates it has transcribed 2.4 million of Trump’s words, four times the length of Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace.

Tracking Trump is not just a problem for exhausted reporters – but also exhausted diplomats, who are tasked with searching for the signal in the ceaseless Trumpian noise.

Western diplomats have upgraded their media monitoring operations to take account of Trump’s habit of dropping an explosive policy announcement or launching an unexpected incendiary broadside against an ally at almost any point in the 24/7 news cycle.

Foreign ministries now also have to look out for the private texts of their boss reappearing on Truth Social.

Trump holds press conferences almost every day, and in his first year posted on Truth Social 6,606 times. Research shows that Thursday midnight, Tuesday 11am, Saturday 5pm and Monday 11pm are the witching hours at which he most frequently issues posts, often leaving western diplomats in a different time zone at a disadvantage.

One diplomat said the most frequent refrain most mornings is: “What has he said this time?”

On the night of 1 December he posted 156 times, and – as on many nights – he mixed market-moving announcements with personal boasts and conspiracy theories, including the possibility that Joe Biden was executed in 2020 and replaced by robots and clones.

For European diplomats, the late-night posts are often the worst since they may be landing on their phones as they make their way into work.

The UK Foreign Office discovered at 6.15am last Tuesday that someone, possibly Nigel Farage, appeared to have got hold of Trump through an intermediary to convince him to denounce the UK Diego Garcia deal, something Downing Street thought had long been put to bed.

A diplomat based in the UK said it is also now becoming a specific skill to be able to translate and sift Trump’s often rambling remarks for any hidden policy gems of genuine consequence.

He explains: “You can have the speech live on your dinner table at home, and he starts speaking about his childhood of playing at a park next to a mental hospital and his mother telling him he could have been a professional baseball player. You start to switch off – you don’t want to live inside this man’s head – and then you realise you missed something.”

Many of these rambling press conferences are pure self-aggrandising junk, but there is always the possibility that he will drop a bombshell that he is, say, planning to send an armada to Iran, or slap 100 % tariffs on Canada.

Another diplomat pointed to the opening section of his anniversary press conference last week celebrating his first year in power, in which he spoke for 80 minutes about why America was “the hottest country in the world” before taking questions.

Soon after saying Somalia does not even resemble a country and the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar is a crook and he personally cannot stand her, he started showing reporters photographs of alleged criminals picked up by ICE in Minnesota, each with the headline “the worst of the worst”.

Then he set off on a monologue that contemplated the photographs before riffing on “a beautiful place in Switzerland where I am sure I am very happily awaited for”, pivoting to Venezuela and opposition leader María Corina Machado’s gift of her Nobel prize and landing on American oil companies’ satisfaction at his approach. “You are not getting bored with this right?” he asked. “I hope not.”

Dame Karen Pierce, Britain’s ambassador to Washington who famously got on well with the Trump crowd, was recently quizzed by another diplomat on the secret of her success.

She explained that she decided to try to go on Fox News as much as possible, knowing that Trump watches it. Some embassies now have a diplomat detailed to cover how Fox is reporting geopolitics, since they believe this is probably the single most important source of Trump’s information.

The diplomat said: “We believe he does not read, but if there is a Maga commentator on Fox, that will be where he is getting his information.”

Some western diplomats even believe the whole week-long row over Trump threatening to impose tariffs on eight European states was purely due to the president being convinced that Europe had sent a reconnaissance mission to start building Greenland’s defences in the face of a US invasion.

“If he sees pictures on TV of a C-130 on a runway in Greenland and there is a Maga commentator spouting nonsense, you are in trouble,” one said.

But just as he is highly vulnerable to misinformation, so is he a mine of disinformation. While fact-checking was a growth industry in Trump’s first term, now it is accepted that Trump has his own facts. But diplomats cannot dismiss them because they are part of an arsenal to threaten rivals.

In a long passage of his speech in Davos, for instance, he claimed the Chinese were selling windmills (as he calls turbines) to Europe, but leave them out of their own energy mix.

“They sell them to the stupid people that buy them, but don’t use them themselves,” he said, to a packed audience of business executives that knew he was spouting nonsense. China’s wind and solar generation in 2024 equalled 40% of total electricity generation in April 2025, according to the thinktank Ember.

He says this because he has demanded the EU buy $250bn (£180bn) of US oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and nuclear technologies every year until 2028.

All of that makes the diplomat’s job very much harder. Fortunately for them, the further Trump strays from reality, the more valuable the diplomat, versed in the art of interpretation, may prove to be.