I make my livin’ off the evenin’ news Just give me somethin’, somethin’ I can use
I think that’s a good point. I wonder if reasonable politicians should prepare a few outlandish talking points to give the media something tasty to sink their teeth into. Like do a normal interview saying normal thoughtful and nuanced things, but also throw in a couple specific wacky clickbait nuggets so the media has what they crave for their news cycle.
Like, what if Kamala had worked this into her interview: Once his criminal trials are over, I don’t think imprisonment in Attica would be appropriate for Trump as an ex president.
Leave it at that and have the media frenzy over it, even though it means nothing. Then they won’t spend as much time trying to invent drama over her interview because she gave them some drama to go with.
I think that’s what Trump is best at. Trump knows most of his base are dumb and the media are thirsty clickbait whores, so he treats his interviews with the decorum of a 2-bit bordello and ends up getting tons of attention that works for his base.
I’m not sure Trump actually has any idea what’s going on around him. His nonsense just doesn’t get caught by the equally stupid base so he looks like he’s playing them. The only people that would support him are the dumbest people imaginable so it’s like saying I’m a skilled athelete based solely on the fact that I can absolutely obliterate my competition…which just so happens to be a bunch of toddlers.
This isn’t to say he’s not a massive threat and that the base won’t vote him in if Americans don’t vote against him but let’s not give him any undue credit here.
I feel that would only fuel the misinformation machine with more fake news. I’d be interested in knowing your rationale and how you feel it would be beneficial to anybody except the news organizations.
I’m talking about controlling the narrative a bit more. Dems are masters at speaking ineffectively and letting the media decide the narrative. And the media spends half its time reacting to whatever outlandish thing Trump said. And Trump says the outlandish stuff on purpose to control the narrative.
So 80% of the time we are in this cycle: Trump says something insane on purpose -> media reports it like it’s half presidential and worth talking about -> Dems are asked to comment on it -> Dems try to ignore it or reply something sensible that gets buried.
The effect is this: Trump controls the narrative -> the whorish media is happy to repeat his BS and normalize him for clicks -> whatever Dems want to talk about doesn’t matter. Low effort voters see Trump and his message everywhere courtesy of the whorish media. Trump remains a viable candidate.
I’m proposing that Dems could try to join the cycle at the input level instead of the tail end. If they say some aggressive or outlandish things about Trump, they’d be trend setters at the start of the cycle instead of irrelevant at the end of it. Like what happened with the “weird” thing, when seemingly by accident the Dems landed one narrative origination that left Trump on the receiving end unable to shake it.
My point is that this shouldn’t happen by accident. The Dems should plan it as part of narrative control. Keep a schedule and say another big thing once per week. Give the media something big to talk about, keep an aggressive message on Trump and his prosecutions, crimes, terrible policies and so on. Anything that controls the narrative, puts Trump on the defensive, and makes the media spread the Dems message instead of giving Trump free publicity.
When the Dems choose not to do this, they are letting the media decide what narrative they want and the media will always prefer to go with sensationalized BS as much as possible, which usually means going over to Trump to say something insane so they have more fodder to normalize and talk about for clicks.
