Perspective: For all his media savviness, why doesn’t President Donald Trump have better stagecraft?

This week, President Trump posed with visiting French President Emmanuel Macron for a photo op of the two men planting a tree from France’s Belleau Wood, the site of a World War I battle that claimed the lives of thousands of American soldiers. But, the optics were notably off. The tree looked small and barren on the White House lawn. The president seemed uncomfortable wielding the ceremonial shovel, and there was no evident plan for where first ladies Melania Trump and Brigitte Macron should stand as their husbands scooped soil.

This wasn’t the first time. Last year, during a trucking industry event, Trump jumped into the cab of a big rig and was photographed pretending to steer it, the images inadvertently evincing the feel of a kid playing with a toy, not of the nation’s chief executive. His assorted overseas trips have been filled with awkward handshakes and a moment when he appeared to “shove” Montenegro’s prime minister, Dusko Markovic, while jockeying his way to the front of a pack of NATO leaders.

Two years in a row, he’s passed on throwing out the first pitch of the baseball season -- one of the few remaining rites of office that is uncontroversial.

These weren’t just unfortunate, clumsy flub-ups, of the sort Gerald Ford came to be known for -- tripping as he descended the stairs from Air Force One or his remark, in the thick of the Cold War, that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” Rather they expose a fundamental difference between Trump and his predecessors in their media operations.

Over the past century, modern presidents have increasingly relied on a strategy, as political scientist Samuel Kernell describes, of “going public” to roll out their political agenda, retailstyle, directly to the American people.

In some ways, Trump should be expected to be better at this: He has a media savviness unlike his predecessors -- he comes from the world of TV and he’s revolutionized, for good or ill, the use of social media in politics. But he’s struggled to translate this into effective strategies for governance. The tree-planting ceremony is instructive. As Twitter users were quick to point out, planting a tree wound up underscoring the dissonance between Trump’s administration and Macron’s after Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord last year and has since allowed his EPA to unwind a number of key environmental regulations. Instead of reinforcing a message of presidential leadership, the tree ceremony highlighted this tension.

He relishes the image of disrupter-in-chief: At a recent speech, he looked delighted to literally throw his script away. But he forfeits a lot of the symbolic power of what Theodore Roosevelt famously called the bully pulpit when he treats his perch so cavalierly.

So, why hasn’t Trump done a better job of harnessing the power of the symbolic presidency?

It’s true that part of Trump’s appeal to his core supporters has been his performative commitment to flouting various presidential norms -- the Twitter insults, dismissively tossing paper towel rolls into the crowd at a hurricane relief center, brushing dandruff off Macron’s shoulder. That he was the un-Jeb Bush and the un-Obama worked to his advantage when he ran for president. Trump saw that breaking the rules of presidential decorum, by dismissing the traditional image-making apparatus, would appeal to Americans disaffected by politics-as-usual.

But this approach focuses inordinate amounts of attention on Trump’s whims and personality, not his leadership ability or his legislative agenda. An improvisational style may work on reality television, where the goal is to entertain audiences with unexpected twists and turns. Even then, though, such publicity ploys frequently crash and burn. The stakes are higher in the Oval Office, and the opportunities for asserting meaningful, rather than purely performative, presidential leadership abound. If the president wants to gain the approval of more than the roughly 40 percent of Americans he currently has, actually embracing the leadership and publicity potential of the bully pulpit would be a logical place to start.