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| Click: 30 seconds |
"President Trump is not always polite. 'Mr. Nice Guy' won't cut it. He does it his way, not the Washington way."
From Pro-Trump ad.
Republicans are spending money right now to reassure Donald Trump. See! You have ads of your own, Mr. President!
They have a second value: they are a heads up to Democrats about message.
The "Bull in a China Shop" ad is playing on cable TV shows Trump watches to counter the ads renegade Republicans in the Lincoln Project are running. Click and watch.
Redefining calm. Notice the action and apparent sense of purpose in Trump's movement. This is Trump's alternative to Joe Biden: resolute energy and purpose. Biden is presenting himself as political peacemaker, offering calm after four years of stormy, contentious, divisive Trump. That's Biden's value proposition. Aren't you sick and tired of Trump stirring up trouble?
Don't be fooled, this ad suggests. It isn't Calm vs. Chaos. It is Worthless Sleepy Joe vs. Action and Purpose. "Donald Trump gets it done," the ad says.
That Trump frame has plausibility. Take a moment. Close your eyes and imagine: Does it seem plausible that Biden would run an ad with a background of upbeat march music, and quick cuts of Biden striding rapidly and purposefully from union hall to construction site down a warehouse aisle and past a warship, with a message of him bringing rapid change to remake America? I don't think so. He is plausible with messages unity, people at a table, bringing multiple sides together, black and white, police and protesters nodding. That's what Biden is selling.
Trump is working to define that as weak, Sleepy Joe.
Redefining pugnaciousness. Some people like Trump's tweeting, his counterpunching, his in your face manner. He makes the libs cry. There is a flip side: he is too pugnacious. Trump embraces it and asserts it as a positive. It takes a rough guy to do a rough job.
Americans are prepared to see a rough guy as heroic. Samson smiting. GI Joe. The Marlboro cowboy. After the Florida school shooting Trump said he would have run in unarmed to tackle the shooter, he sure would have.
His detractors see this image of Trump as ludicrous. Indeed Trump hiding in the White House bunker--#BunkerBitch-- is a new meme that circulates and which apparently infuriates Trump, that notion of him cowering in a bunker. The meme undermines the rough-guy-to-do-a-rough-job image There is reporting that said that it was this story that infuriated Trump and caused him to demand the photo op of him stride across Lafayette Park to hold the Bible.
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| Click: Funny 4 minute sendup of Trump cowering. |
What we learned from the ad:
1. It clarifies what Trump is trying to sell: Action and change, made possible by a guy who is admittedly rough
2. This ad clarifies for Democrats likely won't work. Showing Trump as a vulgar, fighting jerk who creates chaos would be easy and fun for Democrats, but not useful. Trump agrees wholeheartedly that he is a vulgar fighter who picks fights.
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| Bunker bitch meme and hashtag |
A better strategy is to undermine the rough, tough image. There is an alternative: Trump as a soft- hands playboy, a phony, a bragger, Putin's bitch, the weirdo who writes sappy love notes to Kim Jung Un. A bunker bitch.
Objectively it makes total sense for a president to be in a safe place if there are security threats to him, i.e. a bunker. But instead of describing this matter of factly,Trump made a "tell." He lied about it, with an implausible lie. He went to the bunker to "inspect it," he said. Bingo. This turns it from a sensible Secret Service precaution into a branding problem. He defined the bunker as a matter of courage, not prudence, and he failed.
Trump has a blind spot. His goal is to look strong and dominating, but he flips in and out of that role. He looks weak next to Putin. Says strange things. Lothario Trump, the swaggering playboy. There is a flip side: pretty-boy Trump, the soft-hands prince, the chickenhawk warrior. Trump hangs this prominently at Mara Lago. He looks effete. Soft. Maybe someone's bitch. The sort of person that a porn star would report wanted a mock spanking with a magazine, and liked it.
Better for Democrats to call him a chickenhawk than a hawk.
2 comments:
Why did the chicken cross the road? To get into the bunker.
The ad is completely false. It creates a fictional "Washington" for a Trump to disrupt. It's utterly contemptuous of the base, because it takes advantage of their simplistic image of the federal government, the "deep state", as if it was a mom and pop grocery that one could simply walk into and change with a few directives.
No, our government is a complex organization, perhaps the most complex ever created, with labyrinthine interlocking loyalties and relationships and conducted by highly motivated ambitious individuals who are extremely adept and reading situations and acting in their own best interests, which coincidentally may parallel the publics, but, more importantly, are able to play the power game with a level of patience and insight that the rest of us simply do not possess even if so desired.
Everything that has been done can be undone, as we have seen as this administration has attempted to dismantle much of the previous one. It's likely to have another cycle as this one fails and is replaced by hopefully a chastised Democratic party.
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