Trump, Campaign Flailing, embarks on another media attack to ‘control the agenda’ in 2020. It is not working.


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

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