The Trump Message Formula Works

It is a juggernaut and Democrats and the Media crumble.   What will stop Trump?  Time and the burden of governance.

The Trump message formula working in the campaign, it worked in the wrap up, and it is working right now in the final stages of the transition.   Presumably it will be employed and it will work when Trump is president.

If readers know the formula they see it clearly: 

    Deny with indignation, and assert your position.

    Identify some room to doubt the conflicting information.

    Attack the media as an unreliable source of information.

    Pivot to strong accusations of someone else, which becomes the central argument.

    Say it is a matter of opinion and people are free to believe what they want.   

    Re-assert original position.

The recent comments by Sean Spicer, the incoming press secretary for President Trump displays the formula with unusual clarity.  Here is a headline from the British newspaper the Daily Mail and then the news story on ABC television and other media outlets in the past 48 hours.  

Deny that Russia influenced the election, doubt the evidence, attack the media,  accuse Hillary Clinton of the crime, say its just a matter of opinion, and reassert original position.  

Perfectly on message.

"Rushing to judgement on this is not in anyone's best interest," Spicer said. 

Besides, he said, "the mainstream media is playing this up." 

The FBI report, he said, "was really a 13 page how to manual for the DNC on how to improve their IT security."   The real problem was the victim was stupid.

And, finally, stick to ones guns, with Trump saying, "I know things others don't know and so they cannot be sure of the situation."

Click Here to Watch one minute clip

The media is flummoxed on how to deal with this and leaders in it admit publicly that they cannot actually openly contradict Trump or his message formula.   In a Meet the Press interview with the editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal on Sunday Gerard Baker said that the news outlet itself loses credibility if it openly notes that something Trump asserts is a lie.   Using the example of Trump's claim that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered 9-11 bombings, for which there "was no evidence whatsoever" it was up to the viewer to "make up his own mind.  News outlets--even conservative ones like the WSJ--lack the credibility to openly disagree with Trump, he admitted.   Reporting it directly causes them to "run the risk that you look like you are, like you are not being objective."  

The underlying admission is that his readers trust the politician more than the news outlet and that to preserve readers or viewers the media needs to accept the formula rather than confront it.  Thousands of Muslims cheered 9-11 in New Jersey?   Well, it is a matter of opinion, who really knows?  Trump said he saw it.

This will not end right away.  The Trump message formula is working so we will keep seeing it for a while.  This blog post began with the assertion that it will start to fray and dissolve.

My evidence for this is history:

LBJ attempted to present the Vietnam War as something America was winning.   He developed what the media called a "credibility gap".  Nixon had to assert that he was "not a crook", but eventually not even Republicans believed him.  George HW Bush faltered on "read my lips", Republicans impeached Clinton over lying about sex, people mocked "Mission Accomplished" and investigated and contradicted the claims of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and there was plentiful coverage of Obama's assertion that if you wanted to keep your health insurance you could.

YouTube: the wolf and the caribou

Eventually gridlock and opposition catches up to presidents.  Trump (and all the other Republican candidates) asserted that he could cut taxes, increase military spending, improve Medicare and Social Security, balance the budget, and pay off the national debt.  All of them.  Simultaneously.  

Sure thing.

Sometimes it takes a while--3 minutes in the video--but the wolf catches the caribou.  Wolves are designed for this.   Sometimes it takes a while and sometimes the elk gets away.  But there are a million things that go wrong.

Presidents in much stronger position than Trump get pulled down.  Trump calls it an electoral landslide because he wants it to be an electoral landslide, but he won by the skin of his teeth.  Trump is unpopular where it hurts him only a little--with Democrats--but also where it will hurt him a great deal, with the GOP establishment.   They were discredited by the election but they were not removed by the election.  They are still in place in the House and Senate and in the think tanks and among the donors.   There are lots of wolves.

If governing were easy then presidents would be wildly popular.  In fact they are barely popular, then they are unpopular.  Trump is briefly in the barely popular era.

Viewer note:  Viewers can cheer for the caribou if they want but--trigger alert!--the wolf gets dinner.  It isn't personal.  It is just the way of the real world.