It’s time to stop calling Donald J. Trump’s presidential operation “the Trump campaign.” It would be far more accurate to call it “Trump Productions Inc.”
Mr. Trump is not running a campaign in the modern sense — or what was the modern sense until about yesterday. Rather, he oversees a prolific content production studio that has accomplished what every major media conglomerate is trying to pull off with mixed success.
It has managed to produce a huge amount of inexpensive programming that has consistently dominated the ratings and the conversation across the entire new-media landscape — cable news, broadcast news, radio, Twitter, Facebook and who knows what else.
With Mr. Trump as its star, show runner and chief content officer, the operation has taken over the vast media space with multiple running plotlines (War With Megyn Kelly; Peace With Megyn Kelly!), shocking comments (A federal judge can’t be fair to me because he’s of Mexican heritage!) and personal insults (Hillary belongs in jail; that reporter is a sleaze!) that keep Americans glued to their screens.
These plotlines often lead to negative portrayals of Mr. Trump. And the Trumpian content can at times be contradictory or even counterfactual, as in false. But Trump Productions appears to be operating on the premise that as long as the conversation is all about Mr. Trump, he is winning. Content is not only king, it is kingmaker, too.
Mr. Trump said that wasn’t quite right when he called me in response to a question I lobbed into his headquarters on Friday, because, well, that’s what he does: provide more content through unrivaled accessibility (though less if his team thinks you’ve crossed him).
“I’m a believer in getting good publicity — not necessarily getting bad — but a lot of it,” Mr. Trump told me. “There’s a theory — ‘As long as they’re talking about you’ — but I’ve never felt that way.”
Still, “once you get the real word out there, not the false word,” he said, “people really like it and you see what happened: I had 17 people against me and now I’m down to one.” He identified the one as “probably Crooked Hillary.”
You can’t argue with the results: Look where it has gotten him. Whether it continues to work in the general election is the 270-Electoral-College-delegates question.
Given his against-the-odds success so far, political strategists from both parties are wondering whether the Trump approach represents the future of political media — and, if so, does Hillary Clinton need to transform her traditional (and relatively press-averse) campaign into a rival studio pumping out its own voluminous counter programming?
“She is fighting a conventional war and he is fighting an asymmetrical war, and I don’t think that bodes well for her,” said Terry Sullivan, a Republican strategist. Mr. Sullivan has a unique perspective on the question, as the former manager of Senator Marco Rubio’s vanquished presidential campaign.
Mr. Sullivan; the former Rubio communications adviser Alex Conant; and a lawyer for Mr. Rubio, Will Holley, had reached out to me to discuss their new consulting firm, Firehouse Strategies. It’s based on the premise that Mr. Trump has rewritten the rules of modern communications strategy, and candidates and corporations need to take heed.
The primary lesson: “The solution is always more content, not less,” Mr. Sullivan said.
The Rubio strategists learned this firsthand during the Republican primaries. Every time they got their hopes up that some new forest fire would incinerate Mr. Trump’s candidacy, he seemed to douse it by pumping out programming for the always-flowing cable and internet news stream.
So, if news of violent protests at Trump events appeared to be threatening his campaign, Mr. Trump could force the discussion into a debate over whether one of his protesters was affiliated with ISIS. (He wasn’t.) And remember how he overwhelmed news of Gov. Nikki Haley’s endorsement of Mr. Rubio ahead of South Carolina’s primary by engaging in a fight with the pope?
Mr. Trump’s willingness to say just about anything, and his merry courting of trouble, was an eye-opening break from the traditional, tightly scripted approach of keeping candidates away from trouble.
More important, it made the news all about Mr. Trump, blocking his opponents’ attempts to break through with carefully planned policy speeches, classic endorsement announcements and 30-second commercials. What’s 30 seconds here or there in a constantly churning, 24-hour Trump marathon?
What Mr. Trump realized, and Mrs. Clinton should too, Mr. Conant said, is that “there’s just a steady flow of information, and if you don’t try to provide the content, your opponents or your critics will.”
Yet Mr. Rubio’s former advisers acknowledged that trying to out-Trump Mr. Trump can prove fatal. Their candidate all but imploded after he tried to match his opponent insult for insult, claiming that Mr. Trump had small hands, which in turn indicated that he had a small — do I really need to finish the analogy?
Their point is that modern candidates do not need to light their “hair on fire, and keep it on fire,” as Mr. Trump does. “You just need to deliver more content,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Mrs. Clinton is not exactly a “light her hair on fire” kind of candidate, to say the least. So far, she has stuck primarily with scripted events, interviews with local media in swing states — which her campaign says are vital even if they escape national notice — and an arm’s-length approach to the national press. She has not held a news conference in the last six months.
Some Democrats have worried that Mrs. Clinton is failing to meet Mr. Trump’s challenge in the new media sphere, as my colleagues Amy Chozick, Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin recently reported.
But Mrs. Clinton’s aides and several of her allies have a different theory: If Mr. Trump’s prodigious content output worked for him through the primaries, it is going to work against him in the general election campaign. That’s when a broader and more diverse electorate tunes in and press scrutiny becomes tougher, especially on big, important policy questions. (To wit: The CBS “Face The Nation” host John Dickerson pushed him Sunday on contradictory statements about Libya.)
“He’s saying things that are so shockingly outrageous, of course they’re going to command the attention of the national news media,” Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, told me. “I don’t know that we feel a particular pressure to try to outdo that every day, given that most of those statements are in and of themselves going to repel key voter groups that he needs in a general election.”
A major “super PAC” supporting Mrs. Clinton, Priorities USA Action, is already running commercials with several of Mr. Trump’s off-color comments about women. (PolitiFact called the spot false for taking one of the comments terribly out of context.)
Geoff Garin, a pollster for the super PAC, said television advertising would prove to be more potent against Mr. Trump in the general election. “People will think more and more whether he’s a good president, not whether he’s a captivating personality,” he said. That is, the content of his content is going to matter in a different way.
On Thursday, Mrs. Clinton showed the perils of Mr. Trump’s current programming by using some of his more explosive foreign policy pronouncements against him in her speech in San Diego. It won wide coverage across television, social media and news sites, heartening allies.
Then came Mr. Trump’s new comment that the judge presiding over a civil-action lawsuit against Trump University, Gonzalo P. Curiel, had an “inherent conflict of interest” because he is of Mexican heritage and Mr. Trump is “building a wall.”
That hijacked the news feed once again. I asked Mr. Trump if that was his intention and he said no, that it was only about the judge and Mrs. Clinton’s speech was too scripted (“phony”) to have much effect.
Whatever the case, it was the latest offering from Trump Productions, which has so far proved that content is king. Now, will that sort of content be kingmaker? Or will it better serve the queen?
No comments:
Post a Comment