How Stormy Daniels Is Beating Trump at His Own Game
Matt Viser: “Stormy Daniels is proving that she is the master of the prolonged reveal.”
“Over the last two and a half months the adult film actress and her lawyer have rolled out a textbook negative media campaign against the master of media manipulation, with a series of tantalizing details and disclosures that has provoked a storm of salacious and damaging news coverage.”
“And the worst for President Trump, who is in the rare position of struggling to win a tabloid-style media war, is yet to come. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is scheduled to appear in a 60 Minutes segment on Sunday in which she is expected to tell plenty more about her alleged affair with Trump in 2006.”
How Yard Signs Helped Defeat Roy Moore
Wade Perry, the manager of Doug Jones’ (D) longshot U.S. Senate campaign in Alabama, told McClatchy that “before Jones even won his own primary, and hatched a plan with campaign chairman Giles Perkins. Their realization: the campaign needed to show Republican voters — some of whom hadn’t voted for a Democrat in decades — that it would be OK to support one this time around.”
“And what better way, they thought, than letting the average Alabamian see rows of Jones signs in their neighbors’ yards?”
“Perry himself can scarcely believe he’s talking about them seriously… But the man who managed the most stunning upset in recent Democratic political history has a larger — and much more important — point he wants to make; his party must be willing to try something different with their politics and campaigns, especially as it prepares to compete this November in a litany of Republican-rich areas.”
Republicans Are Using the Russian Playbook
Jonathan Chait: “Odds are, you don’t remember any of the particular revelations contained in the stolen emails from John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee. But when WikiLeaks published them two years ago, they created a furor. The snippets of conversation, wrenched out of context, seemed to supply hidden evidence of what Hillary Clinton’s critics on both the left and the right already suspected. Here was Clinton scheming, using crass political logic and language, deriding Bernie Sanders, and acknowledging her weaknesses.”
“The email hacks did not actually reveal anything nearly so incriminating. What the episode showed was that, if hostile actors are allowed to peek into a vast trove of their target’s private thoughts, they can usually find something that sounds shady. This is exactly the method Republicans are now using to discredit the FBI.”
How Trump Uses Twitter as a Weapon
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A Worldwide ‘Fake News’ Crisis
“Even the strongest of Trump backers should think long and hard about a world without facts and common truths,” Axios reports.
“You might love his middle finger to the media. But even the strongest of Trump backers should think long and hard about a world without facts and common truths. His techniques — especially claiming bad or unwanted news is ‘fake news’ — are getting copied worldwide, just as evil actors like Russia are getting better at spreading misinformation.”
“Despots use fake news as a weapon: Leaders or state media in at least 15 countries have used the term ‘fake news’ to try to quell dissent or defuse questions about human rights violations.”
“In the U.S.: Within seconds of any major attack or shooting, fake news (real fake news: news that is actually false) starts circulating about the suspect and victims, forcing tech platforms to apologize for surfacing news from faulty sources — think Vegas shooting, Times Square subway bombing, etc.”
Will Nixon’s Defense Work for Trump?
Julian Zelizer: “With Nixon, the three-pronged strategy did not work. In the end, the revelations became so damning that the court of public opinion turned against him and Congress prepared to move forward with impeachment. President Trump might actually be able to pull off what Nixon failed to accomplish. He has a number of advantages that Nixon lacked—from a Congress controlled by fiercely partisan Republicans whose political calculations have led them to stand by their president regardless of almost anything that he does, to a conservative media that perpetually broadcasts his points of view.”
“Those who believe that a damaging investigation will inevitably produce negative political results for President Trump should not be deluded. The questions on the table will be: What can Robert Mueller and his team do to counteract Trump’s counteroffensive? Can they withstand the kind of attacks that they will continue to face, which will only become worse as the president becomes more frightened, and will the final report that his team produces be so damaging that it has the capacity to break through the partisan firewall that has insulated this president? Will the Republican Congress ever take a more proactive stance, or might there be a Democratic Congress after 2018 to pick up the slack? Can Mueller carve a legal path, accepted by the courts, that opens the president to criminal prosecution?”
Democrats Ready to Embrace a Class War the GOP Started
McClatchy: “The GOP’s controversial dual effort to revamp the health care system and tax code has convinced Democrats they should bluntly assail Republicans as the defenders of out-of-touch plutocrats, a message party operatives have already begun to poll-test, include in attacks ads, and use against vulnerable incumbents even before Saturday’s passage of the Senate GOP bill.”
“And rather than wince at the inevitable retorts that the party is trying to instigate a class war, leading party strategists say they welcome the attack — confident the GOP’s legislative priorities make them a more likely culprit in the public’s mind.”
Said one party operative: “If we’re eating the rich, they bit first.”
Divided GOP Unites By Attacking Hillary Clinton
“Republicans say doubling down on investigating Hillary Clinton is a smart strategy in the coming months as the cloud from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation looms over the White House,” The Hill reports.
“Even though Clinton does not hold public office anymore, they say she remains the one person who can rally the Republican base and unify a splintered party constantly bickering with itself. And the Republicans making this pitch aren’t just the Breitbart News crowd.”
Said GOP strategist Susan Del Percio: “It may not be the best policy strategy, it certainly is a good political strategy. When it comes to the president, he must always have an enemy to punch at. It’s actually a pretty safe strategy.”
Do Campaigns Even Matter Anymore?
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How Social Media Quickly Generated Mass Protests
New York Times: “In a matter of hours on Saturday, thousands rushed to the nation’s airports, beckoned by tweets. The flash protests in response to Mr. Trump’s immigration ban, which continued to grow in many cities on Sunday, were as organized as they were instantaneous. Dispatched online, the protesters knew where to go, and they knew what to do once they arrived: to command the story by making a scene.”
“Mr. Trump feeds off media attention. Throughout the campaign, the bigger a spectacle he created, the larger he loomed in the public consciousness. What has been remarkable during the last two weekends is how thoroughly Mr. Trump’s own media personage was blotted out by scenes of protesters.”
Trump Shows How to Smother a Scandal
Brendan Nyhan: “The bar for scandal in the Trump administration keeps being raised. Every week brings potentially damaging developments that in other contexts could have generated weekslong controversies. With so many competing stories, however, they are frequently ignored or forgotten.”
“As a result, even negative coverage can sometimes benefit President-elect Donald J. Trump by displacing potentially more damaging stories from the news agenda.”
“Scandals need time and space to develop. When the news cycle is congested, potential scandals are deprived of attention, causing the media to move on to other stories and the political opposition to anticipate that any criticisms will probably have little effect.”
How Trump Rewrote the Scandal Playbook
Ronald Klain: “As someone who served as an adviser to the Hillary Clinton campaign, I fundamentally disagree with everything that Trump stood for on the trail. But it would be foolish to ignore how often his tactics were effective. The president-elect refused to release his tax returns; he’s been accused of sexually harassing numerous women; and he’s likely to take office on January 20 without having divested his business interests. How did he get away with it?”
“Trump saw a change in the political landscape that many other failed to see; and everyone from political strategists to corporate communicators to those in the media would do well to pay attention. If they want to survive controversies in the future, they’ll want to study these five core postulates of Trump’s new crisis management playbook.”
How Democrats Help Trump
George Lakoff: “Without knowing it, many Democrats, progressives and members of the news media help Donald Trump every day. The way they help him is simple: they spread his message.”
“Think about it: every time Trump issues a mean tweet or utters a shocking statement, millions of people begin to obsess over his words. Reporters make it the top headline. Cable TV panels talk about it for hours. Horrified Democrats and progressives share the stories online, making sure to repeat the nastiest statements in order to refute them. While this response is understandable, it works in favor of Trump.”
“When you repeat Trump, you help Trump. You do this by spreading his message wide and far.”
How Trump’s War on the Media Hurts Democracy
First Read: “Think about it: Every time Trump claims, without substantiation, that millions voted illegally, and every time the news media call him out for it, that only delegitimizes the media among Trump’s supporters. And then when the same media write and cover Trump’s conflicts of interests (or policy proposals or anything else), those same supporters won’t believe a word of it. Will the media be alone in this challenge? Or will members of BOTH parties decide that what’s happening to two key institutions — the press and the vote — is worth fighting for?”
Quote of the Day
“We got played again.”
— CNN’s John King, after Donald Trump staged another media spectacle before announcing he agreed that President Obama was in fact born in the United States.
Quote of the Day
“The media may be a dirty filter at times, but it’s the filter through which you communicate to the American people. It impedes your effectiveness if you view this as a relentlessly adversarial relationship.”
— David Axelrod, in an interview with NPR.
Why Trump Should Be a Fundraising Success
Patrick Ruffini: “I don’t like Trump, but speaking objectively and from experience, Trump’s low-rent demagoguery is tailor-made for fundraising success on the Internet. Trump appeals viscerally to a grassroots concerned about immigration, security, and the loss of American identity. He’s been able to fill stadiums for rallies (provided they are close enough to the election). He’s generated massive revenues for media companies and built an unprecedented social media following for a Republican candidate. He’s been able to do things at a grassroots level that no other Republican candidate before has done, and had he tried earlier, this would have translated to tens of millions in online contributions in the primary and hundreds of millions in the general.”
“About the only place Trump’s political success so far isn’t reflected is in own campaign bank account — which has burned through all but $1.3 million in cash with five months to go.”