Using the President

The White House Office of Communications has a number to tools in its tool chest on how to control the media narrative or how to set the media agenda--think of it as the engine of a car, and think what happens when you decide you want the car, but prefer to bypass the engine.  If Fred Flintstone comes to mind, you are not far off.

I say this because Donald Trump believes that the only one who understands how to control the media narrative or set the media agenda is Donald Trump. I excused Trump initially because it was his own instincts that enabled him to win the nomination, and then win the election.  But campaigns are not governing. The biggest differences are 1) you share attention with competitors (and can use that to your advantage) and 2) campaigns have a short time limit that can allow you to move the media off a negative story on to something else.  When you are president, YOU are the story and you get at least four years, thus it is much harder to move the media off the scent of impropriety, particularly when those improprieties pile up in a way to create a narrative--an all inclusive storyline that seems to explain all things, both big and small.

It is the Office of Communications that can monitor and control the media noise 24/7 in order to free POTUS to do other things.  It is the OC that can control the release of bad news (Friday News Dump), manufacture news (Video News Releases), and from time to time using the president's command of media attention to launch new initiatives or to rebut any negative attention that from time to time creeps up.  But all of this assumes that you allow the OC to act as the gatekeeper of information coming in and out of the White House.

But Donald Trump has decided that either the OC is filled with people who are not up to the job of protecting the presidency or that he has a much better idea on how to do communications. And I think we can all speak with great confidence that he cannot manage communications, control the message, or set the media agenda. Time and again Donald Trump has crippled the OC--the people who work in communications--from doing their jobs.  To refresh:

• Using Twitter to stomp all over the message developed by OC;
• Directly contradicting the statements made by your subordinates, including high value subordinates such as the VP;
• Extemporaneous remarks at specialty crafted events such as a graduation ceremony that leads to more questions and crushes any media message you wish to push;
• Not preparing in advance for interviews nor caring about details. For instance, it is PAINFULLY clear that our president, to borrow from Simon and Garfunkel, doesn't "know much about history".  I am positive that there are folks in OC who try as best they can to steer the president away from certain topics, and yet this president seems to take this advice as a challenge to his ego, thus encouraging him to "sally forth". Just revisit Trump's recreation of pre-Civil War history in his interview with Salena Zito, a conservative journalist who probably could have helped Trump with the interview.

So far, this presidency has had, to be kind, one of the worst starts of any modern presidency save for FDR walking in on Day One with the Great Depression crashing against his administration.  But what is bad is on the verge of becoming an absolute train wreck that will consume his presidency unless President Trump can do the following things:

1. Trust in his communications people and turn over all day to day communications to them.  This may mean a shake up in staff--for instance, getting rid of Sean Spicer since he has 0 credibility with White House Press Corps and apparently does not have the confidence of Trump.  This also means handing over the Twitter account to the folks in the Office of Social Media inside the OC, and de-activing your personal account.  And finally, turn off your TV, and if you need to watch TV, stick to sports or Netflix.  Right now Trump is stuck in this weird cable news loop where his comments are in response to the stories he watches minute by minute. The president's job is on the long term, and you cannot focus long term if you are glued to what cable news is saying about you and the job you are doing day to day;
2. Encourage the OC to develop a war room that gets into the mud to respond to any and all negative storylines about the administration.  This enables the president to appear above the fray and "presidential". Americans have an image of the presidency in their minds, and if you damage that image, you damage your public support long term.  Clinton understood this during impeachment;
3. Stop this unproductive to war on the "media". We get it. You don't like the press. It gets applause lines during the campaign. Well you are not alone in not liking the press.  No modern president--Democrat or Republican--has liked the press.  Your biggest advantage is that the press is not a monolithic entity.  It is made up of thousands of reporters representing hundreds of competitive businesses. Understanding that enables you to play that competition to your advantage--think collective action problem. But this needless war which you feel compelled to poke the media in the eye by denying some reporters access or shutting them out from important events runs the risk of actually forcing these competitors into a short term alliance to fight YOU.  And even though the phrase is antiquated, it still applies: "You don't pick fight with people who buy ink by the barrel."
4. Finally, a very important variable keeping at bay the train wreck is the Republicans in Congress understand the importance of brand, and they have tried their best to mitigate your comments or to throw water on them to try and keep them from becoming a feeding frenzy. Thus I bet many of them welcomed this special counsel since it allows them to deflect your self-inflicted controversies to this slow moving and non-public investigation.  But at some point these Republicans will look to their own survival, and if that means throwing you under the bus, so be it.  The danger of course is if you lose the support of Republican MCs, the media story becomes critical since it is no longer just a Democrat vs Republican controversy that is getting covered.  When your team defects to the other side, the media is much more likely to hone in on the central contentious issue, and that is fatal.  Again, to reference Clinton and impeachment--by compartmentalizing the controversy, the president was better able to keep his team in tact by tending to public approval--the Democrats in Congress understood their midterm chances were better off sticking with Clinton rather than breaking with him.  It is my belief this is where the GOP MCs are right now--looking at their midterm chances and trying to decide whether they are better off throwing Trump to the wolves or sticking with him.  

I am not a betting man, but if I were, my bet would be that Trump will disregard all of this. He is incapable of getting out of his own way. 

Censure

The tornado that is Donald Trump, as a candidate, could have just as easily been the Democrats nominee as the GOP nominee, and might very well have been had it not been for Barack Obama, and the high profile war between the two regarding Obama's birthplace and then the White House Correspondents Dinner. That sealed the deal that Trump would be a Republican.

I write this only to illustrate how the GOP Member of Congress, not to mention the public, owe President Trump no loyalty.  I think that Republicans were happy when Trump won in 2016 to embarrass the Democrats--and Hillary Clinton--as badly as they did, and I think that the GOP elite figured with unified party government, and since they had all the experience, they would be the ones leading the inexperienced Trump by the nose.  But that of course didn't happen.  Because just as Trump is no Republican, he also is not one to be lead by the nose.

Thus the question we have all been wondering is when will the Republicans break with President Trump, Party of One?  The first month or so of the administration, the Republican Congress hoped the President would act in unison to put their stamp on the country having suffered through the Obama years.  And it was bad from the start. 

First, Trump assumed that running the presidency was the same as running your business, where you can order people to do whatever you want and they do it, and when you can run a line of bullshit and no one notices.  And he assumed the GOP in Congress were nothing more than board members where he was CEO.

Second, Trump assumed that communications worked the same as when he was CEO of Trump, Inc. As CEO of Trump Inc., he worked the press with bombastic statements, because any press coverage was good for the business.  But the last 30 years of the rhetorical presidency has told us that the communications works best when the entire presidency speaks with only one voice, and the president is used sparingly only when necessary. In a normal presidency, the Office of Communications would be working 24/7 to manage the president's image and message.  But Donald Trump knows best.  He didn't get around to appointing a director of communications until a little over a month ago, and prefers to run his own communications irrespective of what the OC does or does not want to do.  Thus you have surrogates out one day saying one thing, and along come the president later on to step right on top of whatever message you had, regardless of how stupid it makes your surrogates appear.

Thus the president has burned the GOP in Congress on healthcare version 1, he proposed a one page tax reform bill, managed to get healthcare version 2 passed by the barest of margins in the House (which runs strictly on majority rule), and then held a victory party featuring a photo of a bunch of smiling, old white men.

All the while, Trump's public approval has gone from bad to worse, finishing lower than any modern president. He has no legislative accomplishments aside from his Supreme Court confirmation win.  He has started his 2020 re-election campaign just days following his inauguration. He brought representatives from Historical Black Colleges and Universities for a photo op to the White House to signal his continuing support (an event marred by Conway's theatrics on the couch in the White House), and then turned around and rejected further funding in his first signing statement.  And to make up the difference in the lack of legislative accomplishments, Trump has decided to hold signing ceremonies for executive orders--which are supposed to be issued with the least amount of public attention possible.  Oh, and just to add to the intrigue, the president fired the FBI director, after blowing him a kiss just a couple of days after inauguration, because his Justice Department recommended he be cut loose for his mishandling the Clinton email episode last year--an episode that candidate Trump wildly applauded when it happened.  Thus the reason was already dubious, when for some inexplicable reason the White House allowed Trump to sit down for an interview with Lester Holt of NBC, where Trump said he was going to fire Comey anyway, and that he had spoke to Comey at least three times where in one of those conversations, Trump suggested a quid pro quo regarding a Russian-connection-investigation and Comey staying on as FBI Director.

And all the while the Republican brand is growing toxic, like the Edsel or Enron.

So why do Republicans continue to support Trump?  They already have strategic retirements in advance of 2018, and it is clear that the life boat in the midterms is not the president.  At some point they need to put distance between themselves and the president or figure out a way to get the president to begin to act like a Republican for the benefit of the team.  That is assuming they want to continue to control Congress.

And if they want to get the president's attention while also protecting the brand, they should use a powerful tool that the Congress possesses--no, not impeachment. Impeachment is a atom bomb where you're not sure about the after effects.  Instead, the Republicans should fire a powerful warning shot across the bow of President Trump and formally censure him for lying to Congress, to his surrogates, and to the American public.  And better yet, it connects Trump with his favorite president, President Andrew Jackson, who was formally censured by the Congress (Senate) as a result of his long standing war on Bank of the United States.

A censure is a formal rebuke that represents a black mark for all of history.  And when the Senate censured Jackson, it drove him absolutely bonkers. The chief sponsor of the censure--Henry Clay--was the one person Jackson said he wished he could have shot because of the censure.

And unlike impeachment, censure can revoked at a later day--say when the president gets the message that he cannot do whatever he wants to do without consequences?

For the Republican Congress, the censure represents the path to walking the razors edge--checking the president without throwing in with the Democrats.  And given the historical severity of the action, it should be a powerful weapon to getting this president's attention, and letting him know that the ball is in his court, and his move is the next.  Maybe that will focus Trump's attention so he turns off the TV, hands over his Twitter account, and begins to make good on all those promises to the American voter that he made during the 2016 campaign?