- Steve Gruber - https://www.stevegruber.com -

The President is Overexposed

While Joe Biden watches his advantageous poll numbers from his basement, President Trump is talking to the press almost every day. Throw in the president’s tweets and there is constant barrage of presidential communication for the hostile press to twist, turn, and take out of context to the detriment of the president’s reelection campaign.

And this campaign is against Joe Biden, a man so bereft of mental acuity that if he wet his pants in public it would be considered a lateral move.

After many years as a political media consultant, I can confidently tell you that the president, given he seems to say almost anything that comes into his mind, is not controlling his message. For the less you say the more you control communications, because it affords your opponents and the media less attack ammo to choose from.

There is an old aphorism about gold: it is expensive because there is not a lot of it. The same value analysis holds true for political communications. Granted, much of what the president does successfully trolls his opponents into mistakes. But he goes farther than that. He is at the point where he seems to be speaking to the press out of sheer habit, combativeness, or ego.

Many candidates for office, of any party, are usually successful in other fields first. This especially is the case for Republicans. Democrats, as in the case of Biden and Harris, are creatures of the state and thus versed at an early juncture on how to take counsel from specialists in public media. But moguls like the president are highly driven and confident individuals. They got to where they were prior to politics by following their own stars. Thus most disdain staff advice, even when that staffer knows much more about the issues at hand than does the candidate.

During my career I often encountered candidates such as this and, when their actions became detrimental to their own campaigns, said this to them: “The reason you hired me is that you realized you can’t do it all yourself. You also realized that there are some people who may have a better grip on some specific political operations than you do, even though you were a highly successful business titan (or physician or attorney). I have little knowledge of those areas but have a good knowledge and track record in this area or you wouldn’t have hired me. So, I’ll make you this deal. I’ll never go near a corporate directors meeting, operating room, or courtroom in my professional capacity. You need to stay the hell out of my commo shop.”

The smart clients got out of the way. The dumb egomaniacs fired me. Somebody needs to say that, or a version of it, to the president and hope for the best.

His seemingly never-ending cascade of words, and the overexposure they bring, are not doing him any favors with the electorate and is only giving his enemies in the opposing campaign and the media more ammo to fire at him at the time and circumstance of their choosing. It needs to stop.