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Public Affairs in the Time of Trump by Eric Bovim and Chelsea Koski Before He Was Elected President, Donald Trump the Candidate Was a Public Relations Revolutionary

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Public Affairs in the Time of Trump by Eric Bovim and Chelsea Koski Before He Was Elected President, Donald Trump the Candidate Was a Public Relations Revolutionary Public Affairs in the Time of Trump By Eric Bovim and Chelsea Koski Before he was elected president, Donald Trump the candidate was a public relations revolutionary. With a genius for generating media—and often controversy—he racked up more free press than any of the candidates he ran against combined. Surprised? This was a candidate who spent more on those red “Make America Great Again” hats than he did on polling. Hillary Clinton’s stark advantages in money, campaign structure, surrogates, and grassroots organizing are well known. She should have won. Somehow, Trump’s pinpoint poll surges in stalwart Democratic states can partly be explained by his unorthodox communications style, which, by now, is well known as he enters his ninth month as president. He has transferred that iconoclastic approach from the campaign trail to the White House, but with mixed results and approval ratings hovering in the high thirties to low forties, depending on the poll. But this report is not an examination of how the 2016 election was surprisingly lost by Clinton, or a look at how Trump’s PR machine (and his heavy Twitter finger) may be damaging his favorability ratings and policy hopes. The political press corps is doing its best to explore these questions every day, even amidst claims by President Trump that much of its reportage is fake news. This report, instead, seeks to explore how President Trump’s unique PR style has totally disrupted Washington, rewriting the public affairs ground rules in the process. Below, we spell out some of the new principles for operating in the Trump White House. In the old Washington, the worlds of Obama and Bush, campaigning President Trump’s was relatively straightforward. You unique PR style hired lobbyists. You hired PR firms. With has totally disrupted the latter, you raised a collective ruckus in the media—articles, Washington, rewriting websites, press releases, etc.—and you aimed the public affairs that noise at decision- makers. Eventually, ground rules in decisions were reached; you won or you lost. the process. Rinse and repeat. SIGNAL www.signalgroupdc.com 2 “It’s completely changed,” says James K. Glassman, a former Undersecretary of State during the Bush Administration and Chairman of Glassman Advisory. “This is the first time I’ve seen people trying to personally reach the president of the United States. That was never true during Obama and Bush. The problem is nobody has any idea what this president is going to do.” Trump’s time in Washington has upended all the orthodoxies of D.C. public affairs. First, we have shifted from an era of 24/7 news cycles to “concurrent” news cycles. What does this mean? It used to be that news, once made, was discussed ad infinitum, until a new topic came along. A story might begin online, or in the morning paper, and it would cascade throughout the day on cable news, the evening news, and late night shows. The cycle would begin anew the next day. Concurrent News Cycles Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Concurrent News Cycles 24/7 News Cycle resident Trump has hijacked the news cycle since the advent of his campaign and he has not P let go since. The Trump campaign—and his administration—are notable for the “multiplicity” of news cycles borne by social media and perpetuated throughout the media bloodstream by accomplices in the mainstream press. The result is that, during the day, we are now buffeted by multiple news cycles, a waning appetite to follow each in too great a detail, and a wandering eye for the next Trump tweet. Monitoring has gone from a full time job, to a team approach as organizations need to have more eyes and react instantly. President Trump’s tweets are unpredictable and now a spectator sport among the White House press corps and national media. His tweets have created a frenzied news atmosphere, a Mobius strip where once one news cycle ends another emerges in the same day. Over any protracted period of time, the following would serve as a severe media test for any president, but consider that these took place in less than twenty-four hours one day in July: Trump publicly upbraids Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his recusal in the Russia probe, all but inviting him to resign and sparking a wave of headlines; the president flies to Ohio and conducts a campaign-style town hall rally where he takes aim at the “fake news” and decries Obamacare after tweeting earlier in the day that it was “torturing the American people”; the president tweets the next morning that he has decided to ban transgender people from serving in the military. SIGNAL www.signalgroupdc.com 3 That has not changed at all as president. For @realDonaldTrump Tweets for the Month of July all the criticisms of the Personal Stang White House for failing Attack, Thank you, New Sta Members to “stay on message,” Condolences 2% Election Clinton 2.3% Voter Fraud, Mid-Terms there is a corollary Attacking Clinton 1.1% 2.6% truth: the media, Obama Policy (Procedure) Attacking Obama Vote Thresholds in Congress, .4% chasing headline after Appointment Blocking Policy (Foreign Policy) International Trade, Negotiations, scandal after tweet, 3.4% Foreign Relations has never fully raked Policy (Domestic Security) 18% Law Enforcement, Immigration beneath the surface of 4.6% these stories. Who can Military blame them? There Equipment Announcements, aren’t enough hours in Veterans 5.6% the day. Media Fake News Policy (Economy) President Trump Stock Market, Jobs 16% 7.6% ascended to the nation’s highest office, in part, by throttling the Event Attendance at U.S. Open, press. Considering the Rallies, Visiting Factories mainstream media’s 12% Policy (Healthcare) Repeal and Replace relatively abysmal Russia 12.4% Russia Investigation approval ratings (only 12% 36%, according to a Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll), it might have been a prescient maneuver. The question now, however, is whether he can thrive by continuing to flog the fourth estate while also bypassing it altogether. “It’s very sad that the media through their own political bias has lost so much credibility that they are now seen as partisan players and no longer an independent source for unbiased facts or truth,” said John McLaughlin, CEO of McLaughlin & Associates and a Trump campaign pollster. In a national omnibus he conducted in June, a majority of American’s (56%) believed the media was biased against the president. It’s very sad that the media through their own political bias has A central irony of President Trump’s “ media disruption is that he is a lost so much credibility that they are voracious personal consumer of media now seen as partisan players and no and producer of content. His Twitter account, with 35 million followers, longer an independent source for is the ultimate shrine to his media unbiased facts or truth.” appetite and genius for circumventing traditional outlets, an emblem of his John McLaughlin, CEO of McLaughlin & Associates SIGNAL www.signalgroupdc.com 4 brand’s unwavering promise to speak directly to the American voter. Our sources tell us Trump’s Reading List that President Trump, increasingly frustrated by seeing his message getting bottlenecked by the mainstream press, is plotting a bigger pivot towards a more campaign-style communications strategy that will include rallies in swing states and other direct-to-voter activities. Where does this leave the mainstream press in today’s Washington? First, they’re not going anywhere, despite being maligned as fake news. The rapid ascent of upstart Axios last year, the new online media company launched by POLITICO alums Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, proves that Americans are eager for high-quality journalism. Second, through Trump’s concurrent news cycle, and amid him calling the news ‘fake,’ media organizations are growing in coverage and ratings. DC news bureaus are staffing up, and outlets on both side of the aisle are increasing viewership as people attempt to keep up. From a campaign perspective, it’s not as if the president and others in the West Wing have forsaken traditional media altogether. True, the president has had a love/hate relationship with the mainstream media; for a long time, he religiously watched MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” only to famously defect and proclaim his allegiance to “Fox and Friends.” Meanwhile, conservative outlets like Breitbart and The Daily Caller, non-grata during the Obama Administration, not only receive press passes to the daily briefings, but also have an active following inside the West Wing, we’re told. The same source says that the president reads five newspapers, cover to cover, each morning, which is a surprising mix of mainstream and conservative media: the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post—and Washington Times and New York Post. Go figure. Orchestrating a public affairs campaign today ni Washington requires a new approach. First, there is a plurality of media channels (with a bias towards conservative outlets) that reach into the White House; the news cycle is unceasing and “concurrent”; there are also new ways companies can use social media. And second, the dense, legalistic corporate messaging that prevailed from D.C. offices in years past does not hold much appeal in this administration. SIGNAL www.signalgroupdc.com 5 What to do? We’ve tried to whittle down our thinking into a list of takeaways that represent our best thinking on how to win in Washington during these early Trump days. This is by no means the definitive list; our thinking will—and must—evolve, as the President changes with the role.
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