Starting with the last year of the investigation by former special adviser Robert Mueller, President Donald Trump regularly repeated a three-word key phrase to his personal lawyer and political defender Rudy Giuliani. “Control the agenda“He would tell his lawyer privately, according to three people who heard the president say this.
Trump would deploy the phrase specifically by commenting on and attaching Giuliani’s latest television appearances, the media hits that would sometimes become comically combative, crumble, and appear to create public relations headaches bigger than they are worth. It doesn’t matter, the president generally advises. Very often, the point was not to keep the peace but to kick the dust up, bring the fight to the media, and try to force the media to cover and discuss issues on Trump’s terms, all in the hopes of balancing or go crazy, public opinion.
It is a strategy that has served this President from time to time, and perhaps the greatest reward is the result of the 2016 election. But the president’s preferred media omnipresence strategy is not always worthwhile. It didn’t stop the House from falling to Democrats in the 2018 midterms, and Trump and Giuliani’s devotion to the tactic possibly sparked the chain reaction that led to the president being charged.
Especially if Trump is in an electoral or political situation, like in the midterm elections, he will require his staff to get as many interviewers in the Oval Office as possible, and that as many of his “exclusives” in television news and cable to be ventilated as quickly as possible. For Trump, virtually all of his political problems can be solved if he can alone capture an ungodly amount of media attention. She clings to this notion even when she is dramatically challenged, such as earlier this year when her regular presence at White House coronavirus briefings devastated her poll numbers, prompting senior aides to beg her to stop doing so, and ultimately resulted in the arrest of the President their appearances
But now, with his daily camera briefings gone, and his 2020 campaign battling Joe Biden amid Trump’s handling of a global pandemic, a shattered U.S. economy, and a mass protest movement, the President and his White House are Once again, going back to the family game plan and mounting yet another media blitz to satisfy Trump’s urges. Several sources close to the president say he feels the measure will improve his chances for 2020, as several other campaign restart and restructuring attempts failed or ended in total disaster.
So far, there is no evidence that the media blitz is working.
Since the end of last month, Trump has conducted interviews with Telemundo, Gray Television, CBS, Townhall, The Washington Post, Sinclair, Fox News and Fox Business. As of this weekend, the president’s position in most public polls against presumed 2020 Democratic nominee Biden remained low. And on Sunday, Fox aired another meeting with Trump, which even some of the president’s closest allies saw as a waste of time.
“You’ll get a certain percentage of Fox viewers voting for him, no matter what happens, so there’s no point in risking like this at this point in the election cycle, especially when you’re not winning.“
In an interview with Fox News Sunday Host Chris Wallace, whom Trump had previously ridiculed as a “Mike Wallace wannabe,” the president claimed that the vast majority of new COVID-19 cases in the United States were simply young “with colds” and said of the rising death toll, “It is what it is.” Elsewhere in the interview, Trump entered into a bizarre debate over the recent results of his cognitive tests, with Trump claiming that the test questions “get very difficult” and Wallace clarifying that one of those questions only asks the patient to Correctly identify the image of an elephant.
“No, no, no,” the president replied to the Fox News presenter. “See, that’s all misrepresentation.”
Not everyone who lives at Trumpworld or serves the President finds the information exchange useful. A senior White House official told The Daily Beast on Sunday afternoon that there is no “rational reason” for the president to have done the Wallace show at this time. Asked why Trump decided to do Fox News Sunday now, another source close to the president immediately replied: “I don’t know.”
This person added: “You will get a certain percentage of Fox viewers who vote for him, no matter what happens, so there is no point in risking like this at this stage of the electoral cycle, especially when you are not winning.”
And on Sunday, Anthony Scaramucci, the former communications director of the Trump White House, who has since become an enemy of Trump, posted on Twitter that “Chris Wallace’s interview is Biden’s campaign announcement.” (Later in the day, the former vice president’s campaign officials did indeed take advantage of the sound recordings from the session.)
Still, others in the president’s orbit sought to work with the referees and simply make Wallace the problem.
Chris Wallace appears to have been taking lessons from Jim Acosta. He’s focusing on petty and divisive levels rather than getting into real trouble, “former Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), current Trump replacement, told The Daily Beast on Sunday night, adding:” I I’d like to see something like Joe Biden’s unrestricted interview. “
Elsewhere in the “unrestricted” interview, the Fox presenter told the president that, with less than four months to go until the November election, “right now you are losing.” He described the results of a new Fox News poll in which Biden led Trump, 49 to 41 percent, among registered voters.
“First of all, I am not losing because those are false surveys,” the president replied. “They were false in 2016 and now they are even more false.”
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