Donald Trump has a powerful media ally.
It’s not Fox.
It’s not Rush Limbaugh.
It’s not Mark Levin or Ann Coulter or Breitbart, or any of the rest of the shill-caliber Trump-centric right-media enterprise.
No, Trump’s biggest media ally in 2020 is the media itself. The mainstream media. You know, the enemy of the people. The Washington–New York media axis. They’re not ideologically in line with Trump. They find his behavior, attitude, actions, and policies largely as revolting as do the 60 percent of Americans who dislike Trump in degrees ranging from distaste to apoplectic rage.
The American media is under constant attack from Donald Trump. They are put at physical risk by the edge cases of his wild-eyed minions. They are insulted by his staff. They are lied to by his most senior advisors with a frequency and intensity that boggles the imagination even as they themselves are routinely cast as liars attacking the only font of truth and wisdom, Mr. Donald J. Trump.
But they just can’t quit him.
Trump knows it, and they know it.
He is the human train wreck from which they can never look away. He is the evidence the dog isn’t house-trained. He is every addiction, wrapped into one package. He knows that no outlet will truly punish him for lying. No outlet will bust the “senior administration official” who makes calls from the White House residence at midnight.
The Democratic campaign will struggle every day to overcome his brighter-than-the-sun media presence. For 2020, they have to build a smart, media-friendly team of surrogates who can get on television—the only place attacks are real for Trump—and follow his rule: Punch back twice as hard. The key is to recruit, train, and inform surrogates early, and tune them to one key point: Always bridge back to making the race a referendum on Donald Trump. Skip the senior statesmen or people with their own ambitions and agendas; get quick-thinking, sharp surrogates with social-media amplification powers. Set them free to “commit news” every time they’re on camera.
Democrats need to dramatically up their earned-media game. It’s no longer “Lemme email you this press release.”
Some of the Democratic campaigns in the primary running up to 2020 seemed a bit…old-fashioned. I was born the week JFK died, so I’m in that bridge between boomers and gen X, but some of the campaigns seem to be ready to embrace the telegraph and that newfangled faxin’. The Biden, Sanders, and Warren campaign operations on the press side weren’t exactly full of digital natives.
Trump is an earned-media machine who depends on his opponents to be on defense, and to respond to his cues. If they spend the day only pushing back on Trump’s tweeted outrages, lies, and bullshit, they’re not pushing out their own messages, and they’re not on the attack.
The media wants war, fire, loud noises, alarums, and explosions. Democrats need press people who are aggressive as hell and don’t need much sleep. It’s better for them to move fast, break shit, and cause trouble than it is to be too cautious. The idea of campaign-ending gaffes by staffers died when Corey Lewandowski grabbed a reporter by the arm so hard it left a mark.
Trump feeds the media, practically every minute of the day. If the Democratic campaign isn’t launching messages at reporters every one of those same minutes, they’re fated to get swamped by Trump’s social-media-powered flood.
The tone of the earned-media efforts needs to get off that snippy, shame-function tone so much Democratic messaging seems to display. You cannot shame Donald Trump. You can put his excesses and evils front and center to the American people to keep your base motivated and to address the targets in the Electoral College swing states. It’s about the damage he’s doing to everyday Americans. It’s about his corruption, vulgarity, dishonesty, broken promises, and failed policies.
Be angry. Be aggressive. Be American. Voters want to see some fight from the Democrats, a return of the happy-warrior ethos where you don’t duck a fight and you’re ready to take on bullies. Stop with the “deeply disappointed” tone—hoist the black flag and commence cutting throats.
The press and media operations of every presidential campaign are always top-down and top-heavy. In 2020, the national campaign needs to put aggressive press operatives on the ground in the top fifteen targeted states. They should be folks who understand the media in Florida or Michigan or Arizona or Pennsylvania. Spend the money; it’ll be worth it. Those operatives need to feed the state press corps in the target Electoral College states stories of real people who have been hurt by Trump’s policies—talk about agriculture in Iowa, trade disasters in Wisconsin, the Puerto Rican hurricane relief failure in Florida, and so on. The national press, with few exceptions, won’t chase or find those stories. Why bother when the Trump twitter feed spews stories that write themselves?
You want a story about that Iowa soybean farmer weeping because she supported Trump and now she’s losing her farm. You want one about that union worker in Michigan or Wisconsin who hated Hillary and held his nose while voting for Trump. Now the trade war has cost him his job.
The great thing about this is that television wants it also. You’re committing news, and you’re spreading a message to local television viewers, news consumers, and social-media junkies that Democrats give a damn about the swing states as much as they care about the coastal blue kingdoms.
What about the big blue states, you ask? Assign one intern to them at HQ. They’ll take care of themselves. Honestly. I know Democrats hate this idea, but the election is already over in thirty-five states. Fight where the fight is.