Trump’s Media Blitz: Talk Radio, a Video Game Celebrity and Elon Musk

 

Trump’s Media Blitz: Talk Radio, a Video Game Celebrity and Elon Musk

 

A whirl of appearances in media venues large and small have defined Donald Trump’s past four weeks, as he tries to wrest attention from his new opponent, Kamala Harris.

 

Michael M. GrynbaumSantul Nerkar

By Michael M. Grynbaum and Santul Nerkar

Aug. 17, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/business/media/trump-media-strategy.html

 

Donald J. Trump’s media strategy can be summed up with a phrase often applied to one of his erstwhile nemeses, the logorrheic New York City mayor Ed Koch: unavoidable for comment.

 

The former president has certainly seemed that way in the month since President Biden yielded the Democratic ticket to Vice President Kamala Harris, upending a campaign that Mr. Trump was once convinced he would easily win.

 

Ms. Harris has dominated the national conversation even as she has mostly avoided reporters and declined to hold a news conference. Eager to reassert himself, Mr. Trump has embarked on a cavalcade of interviews in venues large and small, popping up on a video game celebrity’s streaming page, calling into a New York City drive-time radio show and holding court from his vacation homes in Florida and New Jersey. His appearances, however, often involve sympathetic interviewers who rarely challenge his words and intersperse questions with heaps of praise.

 

The results have been mixed. Fans enjoyed his appearances, and Mr. Trump’s news conferences were carried live on cable news. But he also set off controversies that his supporters have scrambled to clean up, such as when he told Elon Musk that some striking workers ought to be fired.

 

A sampling of Mr. Trump’s media-heavy month:

 

‘Sid & Friends in the Morning,’ WABC-AM

Date: July 30.

 

Interviewer: Sid Rosenberg, a longtime New York City radio personality who came to fame as a blunt-spoken commentator on Don Imus’s show (from which he was eventually fired for making offensive remarks).

 

Notable Trump quote: “If you’re Jewish, if you vote for a Democrat, you’re a fool, an absolute fool.”

 

Why? “Sid & Friends” is a drive-time radio show that is not exactly a must-listen beyond certain toll roads in the New York metropolitan area. But Mr. Trump, who grew up immersed in his hometown’s elbows-out radio culture, had called in before, and he is friendly with John Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of WABC.

 

Degree of difficulty: Low. Mr. Rosenberg is a longtime Trump fan.

 

Convention for the National Association of Black Journalists

Date: July 31.

 

Interviewers: Harris Faulkner of Fox News, Kadia Goba of Semafor, Rachel Scott of ABC News.

 

Notable Trump quote: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black.”

 

Why? The Trump campaign has made a concerted effort to make inroads among Black voters. This interview, though, created controversy: Mr. Trump trash-talked a journalist, fumed that his interviewers were not as deferent as he preferred and unleashed ugly conjecture about Kamala Harris’s ethnic identity that Democrats have relentlessly used against him.

 

Degree of difficulty: High. This was the toughest and most sustained grilling from journalists that Mr. Trump has faced since his June debate against President Biden.

 

Fox News

Date: Various in July and August.

 

Interviewers: Maria Bartiromo, Laura Ingraham, the hosts of “Fox & Friends.”

 

Notable Trump quotes: “I’m explaining that to them: You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote anymore. I won’t need your vote.”

 

Why? While his relationship with Fox News has had ups and downs, Mr. Trump still regularly returns to the network, a powerful soapbox.

 

Degree of difficulty: Low-ish. Ms. Ingraham did urge Mr. Trump to clean up earlier remarks when he told a Christian group, “You don’t have to vote again,” which he declined to do. But for the most part, Mr. Trump has avoided tougher interviews on Fox News with political anchors like Bret Baier. Instead, he prefers the star conservative commentators who are among his most loyal media allies; Ms. Bartiromo and Mr. Trump, for instance, have been friends for decades.

 

Kick.com

Interviewer: Adin Ross, an internet celebrity, right-wing provocateur and prominent gamer who broadcasts on Kick, a site that is a rival to the video game streaming platform Twitch.

 

Date: Aug. 5.

 

Notable Trump quote: “I think it’s incredible.” This was Mr. Trump’s reaction after Mr. Ross presented the former president with a gift: a customized Tesla Cybertruck.

 

Why? Mr. Ross, 23, is hugely popular with young men and is something of a cult figure on the Very Online political right. The interview at times attracted more than 500,000 listeners, who heard Mr. Ross offer Mr. Trump a full-throated endorsement.

 

Degree of difficulty: Extremely low. Along with the Tesla, Mr. Ross gave Mr. Trump a gold Rolex watch. The gifts were both generous and potential violations of federal campaign finance laws.

 

X

Interviewer: Elon Musk, a billionaire tech entrepreneur and prolific pitchman for his own social media platform.

Date: Aug. 12.

 

Notable Trump quote: “They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say: ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’”

 

Why? Mr. Musk, who commands nearly 195 million followers on his X account, has a following that far outstrips those of even the most prominent traditional journalists.

 

Degree of difficulty: For Mr. Trump, low: Mr. Musk, who has endorsed the former president, is sympathetic to much of his worldview and lobbed mostly softballs. For listeners, high: Technical glitches delayed the interview 35 minutes, and users struggled to get access to the livestream.

 

Televised news conference; Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Fla.

Interviewers: The assembled national Trump press corps.

Date: Aug. 8.

 

Notable Trump quote: “Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours — same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not — we had more.”

 

Why? Mr. Trump loves being on TV, and many cable news channels carried the hourlong news conference live.

 

Degree of difficulty: Medium to high. News conferences are not ideal environments for the kind of sustained questioning that can pin down a candidate. But Mr. Trump did face a variety of challenging questions about the wisdom of his campaign strategy as polls show that Ms. Harris has tightened the race in key swing states.

 

Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016. More about Michael M. Grynbaum