Taking Back Trump's America, page 31
Here, the implicit CNN and MSNBC motto was this: “Never give a sucker or Donald John Trump an even break—and always put your forgiving finger on the scale for Sleepy Joe.”
Stories that the Never-Trump media assiduously shunned because they might help Orange Man Bad included any evidence of a robust economic recovery, declining infection rates, proof that opening up the economy had no more effect on infection rates than severe lockdowns, and especially any possibility that Trump might deliver a vaccine before Election Day.
Yes indeed: Let’s not give any hope to the poor and huddled masses of American voters yearning to be gainfully employed and free of a deadly pandemic.
And by the way, there was also this platinum rule: never blame Communist China for the pandemic because to do so would be to absolve Donald Trump of any such blame.
Nowhere was this lies-of-omission phenomenon more evident than when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain came to the White House on September 15, 2020, to sign the so-called “Abraham Accords.” This was the first peace treaty between Israel and any Arab countries since Israel’s normalization of relations with Jordan in 1994.
For the American media in normal times, this should have been a very, very, very big—the Boss would say huge—foreign policy achievement. It was an achievement custom made for the A-block of every major cable and broadcast news show and should have been placed above the fold on the front page of every major newspaper. So of course, there was barely any coverage in the mainstream media. Not with President Trump standing to gain a gob of good press right after the Labor Day kickoff of the final home stretch to Election Day.
Comedy or farce, call it what ye will, this particular lie of omission took a page right out of Dante’s Inferno—“abandon all hope for good journalism, all ye biased hacks who enter the newsrooms of CNN and MSNBC.”
Lemmings Singing from the Same Sheet of Spin
In tactic three, during the 2020 cycle, cable news producers, hosts, in-house experts, and friendly surrogates would quickly develop key talking points for the stories of the day, with the implicit daily spin directive being: everyone shall sing in perfect harmony from the same sheet of Never-Trump music.
At times, the lemming-like spin would boil over into the hilarious. On this comedic note, one of my great pleasures during the campaign was watching folks like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson create skewering montages whereby a baker’s dozen of personalities on CNN or MSNBC would all mouth the exact same talking points. Verbatim. One. After the other. After the other.
And it was a huge bonus when a Hannity or Tucker montage co-mingled Democrat politicians mouthing the very same talking points as the CNN or MSNBC personalities. Such rapid-fire montages thereby underscored not just the incestuous and collusive relationship between the globalist political class and the Corporate Never-Trump Media but also the shared mission of defeating one Donald John Trump.
Tactic four was joined at the hip with tactic three: It involved the coterie of in-house echo chamber contributors and external surrogates that every cable news channel employs. It would be this choir of Never-Trump sopranos that would collectively help drive the daily fake news cycle.
From the same sheet of spin, these contributors and surrogates would mindlessly parrot whatever talking points were propagated by cable show anchors and the so-called news “packages” put together by the CNN and MSNBC reporters.
On shows like MSNBC’s Morning Joe, for example, this echo chamber featured pompous windbags like globalist extraordinaire Richard Haass, legal expert and Zoom porn star Jeffrey Toobin, and the once obese poverty pimp turned skinny poverty pimp otherwise known as the “Reverend” Al Sharpton.
By the way, I liked the fat Al Sharpton from the 1980s a whole lot better than Skinny Al. That portly, “hate those crackers” version of Al Sharpton was a lot more honest, albeit in his own dishonest way.
At the Dawn of Cancel Culture
The fifth and final tactic in the daily spin cycle was the “freezeout.” Particularly in the last few months of the 2020 campaign, both CNN and MSNBC began to sharply limit the appearances of any surrogates from the campaign or the White House who might forcefully and credibly present the president’s point of view, and this particular tactic would hit me right between the eyes.
Time after time, Roma Daravi or Emily Weeks on the White House communications team would pitch me to producers across the Never-Trump media diaspora. The non-response: emails never answered, voicemails never acknowledged, and a whole lot of crickets. In fact, the only administration official these networks would ever take at the drop of the hat was Saint Fauci—which never ended well for us.
In this freezeout, the one TV personality I found the most disappointing—a true case of woman bites dog—was Judy Woodruff, anchor of the PBS NewsHour. The NewsHour is one of the longest running and most prestigious news shows in American history—I myself began watching it as far back as 1983 when it was the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. It was just top-shelf, first-class journalism, at least back in the day.
Not so anymore with Woodruff at the helm, a gaggle of Never-Trump producers managing content, and a steady stream of left-wing analysts and insufferable commentators like Mark Shields and David Brooks—all courtesy of the US taxpayer.
By the way, it’s long past time to shut that government spigot off to PBS and its radio sister, National Public Radio. If they want to play partisan politics like CNN and MSNBC, that is certainly their right and choice. But under such circumstances, they need to go out and raise their own money from their left-wing base. MAGA folks like me have no interest in paying for crap like that. Just saying.
And by the by the way, if you want to know who the real Judy Woodruff is behind that sweet, grandmotherly countenance, just watch her ask the first question in the October 5, 1988, vice presidential debate between Republican Dan Quayle and Democrat Lloyd Bentsen. At that time, Dame Judy was in full blossom in her blonde and beautiful youth, and she was already deeply into the process of sharply elbowing her way into what, at the time, was very much a man’s world. Good for her.
Of course, to make her mark in that vice presidential debate, the not-so-good Ms. Woodruff first faked a hard punch to Quayle’s nose and then kicked him somewhere south of his belt buckle with this opening question:
Senator, you have been criticized, as we all know, for your decision to stay out of the Vietnam War, for your poor academic record. But more troubling to some are some of the comments that have been made by people in your own party. Just last week former Secretary of State Haig said that your pick was the dumbest call George Bush could have made. Your leader in the Senate, Bob Dole, said that a better qualified person could have been chosen. Other Republicans have been far more critical in private. Why do you think that you have not made a more substantial impression on some of these people who have been able to observe you up close?26
It simply does not get more brutal than that. And you have to wonder if Dan Quayle had been a Democrat whether Woodruff would have even gone there. Bias is as bias does.
More than forty years later, as the now the wizened face of public television news, Woodruff repeatedly refused to put any White House spokespersons on her show during the final months of the campaign.
As it was told to me by the comms team, Poor Judy was in a freezeout pique over the fact that President Trump had not agreed to be interviewed by her. Whined Woodruff and her producer: “I’m the only TV anchor the president has not agreed to be interviewed by.”
My own theory is that PBS simply did not want to give us any airtime. Either way, Judy’s show became the PBS Fake News and Freezeout Hour right along with CNN and MSNBC, the Sunday news shows, and all the broadcast networks.
In the end, the information war waged against President Trump by the Never-Trump media was yet one more nail in the 2020 election coffin lined with far too many strategic failures. As we shall see in the next chapter, which will bring our discussion of Strategic Failure #5 to a close, the root of all this evil was a mediocre White House communications team and a not-so-merry band of Trump media surrogates simply not up to the job of Trumpian domination of the daily news cycle.
Twenty-Eight
A White House Confederacy of Media Dunces
If you aren’t on TV, you can’t be in this administration.
—President Donald John Trump, Oval Office, June 22nd, 2020
[Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows gets slaughtered on CNN by Jake Tapper. Marc Short and four other members of Vice Presidents Pence’s staff get COVID. This couldn’t happen at a worse time as it emphasizes the coronavirus theme and how we have mishandled it even as it threatens to take Pence off the campaign trail…. Only [National Security Advisor Robert] O’Brien on Face the Nation has a good [outing]…. No money [left] for get out the vote. No money for advertising. No money for lawyers to contest what is likely to be a contested election.
—Navarro Journal Entry, October 24, 2020
To dominate the daily news cycle, any presidential administration has at its disposal at least four distinct pools of talent.
•First and foremost, there is the White House press secretary;
•Second in importance and potential impact is the White House chief of staff;
•Within the perimeter of the White House, there should also be key senior officials ready, willing, and able to serve as TV surrogates; and
•Fourth, there should likewise be a very deep bench of media-hardened and well-seasoned cabinet secretaries.
Unfortunately, in the Trump White House, we would not hit cleanly on even one of these four cylinders.
A Parade of Mediocre Press Secretaries
Like an orchestra conductor, the White House press secretary should lead on a daily basis a beautiful symphony of pro-administration talking points designed to define, shape, and ultimately dominate the daily news cycle. To pull off such a feat, however, any press secretary must possess a keen intellect, be a quick study, have the ability to equally quickly throw counter punches, and do all of this in a witty and urbane fashion.
Press secretaries who fit this description historically include the truly debonair Pierre Salinger for John F. Kennedy; the wise-as-an owl Bill Moyers for Lyndon Johnson; the straight- and plain-speaking James Brady for Ronald Reagan; the Aaron Sorkin-inspiration Dee Dee Myers and Q-factor-off-the-charts George Stephanopoulos for Bill Clinton; and the elegant street fighter Dana Perino and erudite streetfighter Ari Fleischer for George W. Bush.
Compare any one of these historical figures with Trump’s Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham, and Kayleigh McEnany, and none ever completely measured up.
Spicer was a hot head on a cool medium with all the pugnaciousness of his Boss and none of the Trump charm.
Spicey literally blew it on day one of the administration with his hyperbolic over-estimate of the Trump Inauguration Day crowd. Melissa McCarthy would stick both a fork and a knife into Spicey the minute she played Sean androgynously on Saturday Night Live.
Spicer would last just 211 days—a New York minute by press secretary standards.
By sharp contrast, Sarah Sanders, the second Trump press secretary, would endure for almost two years. Ironically, Sanders had virtually no ability to counterpunch when Never-Trump media emissaries like CNN’s Jim Acosta and Kaitlan Collins or ABC’s Jonathan Karl would throw repeated leftist hooks at her glass jaw. I say “ironically” because Sanders worked for the greatest counterpuncher in presidential history in Donald Trump.
Trump’s third White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, would go down in history as the only press secretary to never hold a regular White House news briefing—this over the course of her nine months in office. “You can’t win the news cycle if you won’t play,” might be the definitive gambler’s slogan here for Grisham. But nobody—including the Boss—ever wanted to gamble on putting Stephanie on the podium.
As for the Trump White House cleanup hitter, Kayleigh McEnany, she never had the gravitas to make any of her talking points stick—and talking points was all she really had when she went to the podium. So when Kayleigh got hit with a tough question, she was often like a deer in the headlights.
Let me drill down just a minute on that gravitas problem: You take a Bill Moyers or Ari Fleischer or Dana Perino, and they clearly had both the intellect and training to understand the nuances of the policies they might be sent out to the podium to defend. Absent those qualities, any press secretary is going to get eaten alive.
A Motley Crue of Chiefs
As a second pool of talent to draw from in the daily battle to dominate the news cycle, the White House also has at its disposal its chief of staff. Chiefs who have excelled in this dimension include Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Kenneth O’Donnell, Jimmy Carter’s Hamilton Jordan, Ronald Reagan’s Fabulous Baker Boys—James and Howard—Leon Panetta for Bill Clinton, and Rahm Emanuel for Barack Obama.
Once again, if we compare any one of these historical figures to the four Trump chiefs of staff, we again come up wanting. As we discussed earlier in this book, the first chief Reince Priebus was just the wrong, small, and inexperienced man for a very big job.
As for Chief #2, John Kelly, from a media perspective, this was like recruiting a trucker to drive a Formula One car. Or maybe like using a chainsaw for open heart surgery.
With his thick Boston accent, a smile always missing in action, and “I don’t suffer fools from the media gladly” tattoos stuck on both his forehead and sleeves, Kelly was brutally and simply incapable of messaging anything to the press.
Fortunately, Kelly didn’t try to “meet the press” very often, but during the 519 days that Kelly served as chief of staff—I painfully counted every one of them—we sure could have used somebody in that office to help us dominate the daily news cycle.
That somebody certainly was not Mick Mulvaney—Trump’s third chief of staff. Or should I say “acting” chief of staff.
That “acting” part of his title was a little dig that the Boss liked to stick into Mick so he never got comfortable in the job. The more Mick begged, the more permanent his “acting chief” status would become.
From a media messaging perspective, the problem with Mulvaney was that God blessed this smug Mick with an overabundance of both arrogance and hubris. It would be these character traits—as they say, “a man’s character determines his fate”—that would lead to one of the worst press conferences ever held by a chief of staff.
On October 17, 2019, Mulvaney would shoot both himself in the foot and POTUS in the chest with fateful remarks that instantly gave new life to an impeachment that the Boss was desperately trying to avoid. Wrote one newspaper:
The hastily announced White House news conference was supposed to be a full-throated defense of President Trump’s controversial decision to host next year’s Group of Seven summit at his private golf club in Florida. By the time it was over, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney had made much more explosive news—adding to Trump’s impeachment troubles and calling into question his ability to lead the White House staff in a time of crisis…. And Mulvaney’s situation was made worse, some Republicans said, by his decision to attempt to retract his remarks hours later in a bellicose written statement blaming the media reporting his remarks.
Yikes. That single press conference was the beginning of the end for Mulvaney even as it underscored yet again the inability of the White House to dominate the news cycle.
I would like to tell you that, at least with Mark Meadows, the “fourth time was a charm.” However, Meadows himself would earn the dubious distinction of being ranked as the “worst chief of staff in history” by the reigning scholar on the subject, Chris Whipple.27
To this I will again say my three favorite words I learned from the Washington Swamp: “I don’t disagree.” Although it’s probably more of a dead heat between Meadows, Mulvaney, and Kelly.
Note to Reince: I think you would have turned out to be the best of the bunch if the Boss had only given you a bit more time to prove yourself.
As still a third pool of talent a White House communications team can draw upon in its efforts to dominate the daily news cycle, there will always be a large stable of senior advisors within the West Wing.
Given that the post of senior advisor to an American president represents the pinnacle of achievement, it is most often the case that a president will be surrounded by tough, smart, and typically media-savvy individuals for whom walking out to Pebble Beach for a media interview is certainly not their first rodeo.
By the way, “Pebble Beach” is the nickname of the set of media tents lined up along the Northwest wall of the White House between the White House itself and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. For me, Pebble Beach was love at first sight because for years back in California I had had to schlep miles upon miles to satellite studios when I started doing regular TV hits on CNBC and Fox Business and occasionally CNN.
At the White House, the ability to simply cross the street from my office and step into a tent with beautiful lighting and crisp sound to do my TV hits was a pure delight. It was a pure delight, except, of course, in the dead of winter when it was 20 degrees or when the lawnmowers were going full bore on a 100-degree July day.
At any rate, particularly during the worst days of the pandemic, there were few senior advisors capable of walking out to Pebble Beach and doing anything but sticking their feet—yes both feet—into their mouths.
