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.