A comparison of the first two weeks in office of our two most recent presidents shows Donald Trump outspeaking Joe Biden by multiple metrics.
Over the first two weeks of his second White House term, Trump spoke publicly on 30 separate occasions, according to an analysis by Roll Call Factba.se. In comparison, Biden tallied 19 speaking events during his 14 days in office.
Trump’s on-camera speaking appearances during his first two weeks this year ranged from Inauguration Day speeches and remarks to an interview with Fox News, a rally in Las Vegas and Q&A sessions with reporters when signing executive actions in the Oval Office.
Those 30 speaking events between Jan. 20 and Feb. 2 represent a drop from the first fortnight of Trump’s first term, when he was captured speaking 33 times, including two leaked phone conversations with foreign leaders.
Still, the number of events only tells one part of the story. Over the two-week period since his inauguration this year, Trump spoke for 9 hours, 38 minutes, and 9 seconds — that’s about 80 percent more than he did during the same period in his first term (5 hours, 21 minutes and 20 seconds) and about 240 percent more than Biden did during his first two weeks (2 hours, 50 minutes).
Trump also bests Biden and the first-term version of himself in terms of words spoken over the first two weeks. He spoke 97,090 words during the first 14 days of his second term, or about 110 percent more than he did over the same stretch eight years ago (46,231 words) and 266.38 percent more than Biden’s first two weeks (26,500 words).
Put another way, Trump’s 97,090 words come in at approximately just over the length of of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” (95,356 words) or about 82.14% of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s political thriller “All the President’s Men” (118,195 words).
Also of note: During Trump’s first two weeks this year, he fielded and responded to 629 questions, many of them about international affairs such as tariffs, foreign aid and a potential U.S. purchase of Greenland. That’s 738.67 percent more questions than the 75 that Biden took over his first 14 days.
As for his well-noted social media habit, Trump had 216 posts on his Truth Social platform in the 14 days since he became president. Over the same period, he had an additional 20 posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, but they were all reposts from Truth Social. His average so far of 15.43 Truth Social posts a day is actually low for Trump. During his first term, he started out at 7.17 tweets per day in 2017 and 9.81 in 2018, but averaged 21.53 per day in 2019 and 33.42 in 2020.
Following a hiatus after he was forced off Twitter in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, Trump returned to social media on Feb. 14, 2022, and began regularly posting from late April that year. He averaged 22.3 Truth Social posts a day in 2022. That crept up to 27.6 in 2023 and 29.34 in 2024.
Notes:
Times are precise, to the second; All counts are just for the individuals and include only words spoken and time speaking on camera. If the individual is silent or others are talking, that time is not counted.
The post Trump demonstrates his gift of gab in first two weeks in office appeared first on Roll Call.
