Getty Images. Donald Trump essentially set the house on fire by shaking
up his staff at this juncture. So what happens now? Jake Novak weighs in
Donald Trump just shook up his campaign by naming two new executives to lead his campaign, essentially demoting campaign manager Paul Manafort.
What does Trump's big campaign shake-up mean? And much more importantly, what should these new campaign handlers actually do?
Trump
was probably very unhappy with the results of his brief "go straight"
strategy that culminated in his economic policy address last week in
Detroit. In that speech, Trump made sure to emphasize all the same major
talking points the Congressional Republicans and the party in general
have emphasized for decades. He did introduce some more marketable new
ideas, but the only real message anyone remembered was the same old
mantra of cutting tax rates. And more importantly, the speech did
nothing to stem his fall in the polls.
By
giving a leadership role to Breitbart co-founder Steve Bannon, someone
who's been a strong critic of establishment Congressional Republicans
and particularly House Speaker Paul Ryan, Trump is making it very clear
he'd rather stick with the kind of sharp attacks and emotionally-laden
rhetoric Breitbart is famous for. It's also the kind of firebrand attack
mode Trump rode to the GOP nomination. It also means that same
establishment GOP in Congress will now be running an almost completely
separate campaign from the Trump forces, and in many cases they might be
effectively running against one another.
The
meaning of Kellyanne Conway's hiring is a bit more nuanced. But it
makes the most sense that someone like her with all her experience
appearing on TV news is being brought in to be the new leading surrogate
and spokesperson for the Trump campaign. In case you haven't noticed, a
lot of those surrogates and spokespeople have made more embarrassing
gaffes than even Trump himself for months now. Conway has just too much
experience on camera not to stem that problem.
Okay,
that was the easy part. The harder part is trying to figure out what
Bannon and Conway should specifically do — that is, if Trump's campaign
is even salvageable.
The
simple answer is that Bannon and Conway clearly aren't going to succeed
if they try to change Trump. But there is a tremendous amount of work
they can do to make Trump do what he does MUCH better.
Let's
start with Bannon and the unique skills the Breitbart machine brings to
the table. You might think Trump already has no problem making
controversial statements and cutting accusations against Hillary Clinton ,
and you'd be right. But let's face it, Breitbart does it better. It has
better writers, a steelier focus, and just stays on message better than
almost anyone. Trump may be a natural attack dog, but he's not a
professional writer and it shows. If Bannon is allowed to grab
copyediting controls over Trump's Twitter feed for instance, it could
help.
And
Conway will need to do something about the still haphazard
communications and organization throughout the Trump campaign. On one
hand, it's refreshing to encounter a presidential campaign that isn't so
slickly produced and a candidate who's willing to say anything without
first having it vetted by a dozen advisors. But the Trump campaign goes
too far to the other extreme. Communicating with his staff and getting
reliable answers from them has been a challenge for months. There's been
little evidence of even a minimum amount of coordination on several
levels. It's come to the point that there's no reason to believe Trump
even has a decent get out the vote plan in place. Conway should at least
be able to diagnose that problem and take a stab at making the Trump
machine a little less chaotic.
Bannon
and Conway have the potential to help Trump follow the example Harry
Truman set in what looked like his hopeless campaign in 1948. Like
Trump, Truman was well behind in the polls to Republican Thomas Dewey
and running against a significant portion of his own fractured party.
Dewey responded by almost dropping out of sight and confining his public
comments to safe and empty platitudes like "Our future is ahead of us!"
Clinton seems to be almost exactly copying that Dewey strategy.
Truman's brilliant counter was to travel the country and keep pounding
the Republican Congress at whistle stop after whistle stop. He never
wavered in that focused attack. If Trump wants to recreate that part of
Truman's shocking win in '48, hiring Bannon and Conway could be a great
move.
But
if the sum total of Bannon's and Conway's contributions are just honing
Trump's verbal attacks and making the staff act more professionally,
that still won't be enough. That's because the Trump campaign has
reached a major roadblock that Truman or really any other major
presidential candidate has never had to face. The always very anti-Trump
news media has now successfully begun to filter all of Trump's
statements and immediately recast them as foolish or even suicidal. This
is a toxic problem that Trump has contributed to and it's not going to
go away now, no matter how much nastier or repetitive he gets. And
simply delivering more "mainstream" messages won't work either, as the
weak response to Trump's economic speech proves. For almost a year,
Trump was able to do the most important thing in politics: connect with
the voters in an emotional way. But right now, the only emotion Trump is
eliciting is scorn.
So how do you fix that?
When
words are literally failing you in politics, it's time to shift to
actions and imagery. Trump can achieve that by stopping all the
campaigning just from behind a rally podium or on his Twitter account
and get out and actually visit some rough neighborhoods and interact
with real people and not just shake a few hands at one of his rallies.
This isn't just something Trump needs to do, as campaigning for national
office by all candidates in recent years has become all about canned
events and rallies that aren't even visually interesting, let alone
authentic. On Tuesday night, Trump broached the subject of why
African-Americans should support him because the Democrats have been
bigoted in their lazy demands for the black vote without really doing
anything to help minorities improve their lives. But as many critics
have pointed out, Trump delivered that message in front of an almost
all-white audience. Imagine if Trump went to a poor, black neighborhood
in Milwaukee to make that message? Imagine if he pointed to a bombed-out
building or crumbling school as he said it? He'd likely be almost
surrounded by hecklers or at least people who will never vote for him,
but the point of that kind of campaigning isn't to win over the voters
in front of you, it's to win over the people watching the video of it at
home. That's exactly what happened to Ronald Reagan when he visited the
South Bronx in 1980. Yes, he was heckled and probably nobody he met
that day from the neighborhood voted for him. But the pictures and video
of a Republican candidate wading into that territory were worth
millions of votes and probably worth more than a billion words.
And
getting back to Truman, it's important that he crisscrossed the country
on that campaign whistle stop tour, speaking in front of the kinds of
people who would never go to a pre-planned rally or canned event that
pass for "campaigning" today. It wouldn't matter all that much what
Trump would say if he did something like this, the TV or smartphone
could even be on mute. The real value would be just seeing him
interacting with real people in a very real setting. The news media can
hate Trump all it wants, and even attack or ridicule these interactions,
but it would basically be forced to show that video in the end. Because
that kind of imagery really looks presidential. Just sounding
presidential, as everyone keeps urging Trump to do, is overrated. Oh and
by the way, getting out among the voters in devastated areas would be a
great move for Hillary Clinton to do as well as she needs to stop
simply being the anti-Trump and look more presidential herself.
But
I'm doubtful that someone who's built a powerful internet website based
on words alone like Bannon, and an experienced studio news show pundit
like Conway are the most likely people to even realize they need to
execute this crucial shift in the Trump strategy. And yet, this is
exactly what Trump should do. Until he finds someone who can convince
him to do so and actually amass a staff that can pull it off, no amount
of campaign shuffles will change Trump's fortunes.
Commentary by Jake Novak, supervising producer of " Power Lunch ." Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.
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