Trump’s main strategy was chaos. His only goal was to dominate the news cycle every single day. Each day he would try to come up with something more outrageous than the previous day. That way, the news media and American public could never spend enough time on any of his crimes to deal with them.
It worked. It worked BECAUSE the primary corporate media has a 24-hour time line. They simply don’t do big stories, stories that require depth of reporting and understanding, or stories that have a life cycle beyond a couple of days. They don’t do that. They aren’t configured to do that. They don’t want to do that.
That’s the reality. Biden needs to understand that. We cannot change the media. But what we can do is leverage their natural tendencies for the good of the nation. This actually is happening, and it very well might be the case that Biden and Klain are pursuing this strategy very consciously. If so, kudos to them. What we see now is something happening every day. Biden is able to have a media-worthy event every single day — and some days he has 3 or 4 major announcements. As a consequence, the media has plenty to fill their 24-hour pipeline and they aren’t spending any time asking what Trump is tweeting today. Oh right, he got banned from Twitter.
This needs to continue, every day for the next 2 years. Some days will be less noteworthy than others, but Biden should be on the offense every single day. Let Mitch and his fellow seditionists criticize yesterday’s announcement while Biden is making today’s announcements Force the Republicans to play defense. And if it takes some manufactured drama in Congress and elsewhere to retain the attention of the media, so be it.
This should be scripted like a Hollywood series. I don’t mean to trivialize the act of governing. Biden is doing the right things. But doing the right things and keeping the media on our message are two different challenges. I do hope this is one lesson Biden’s people have learned from Trump. Use it for good.
Don’t be afraid of controversy. Controversy works to our advantage because it focuses the media and gives us an opportunity to frame the issues to our advantage when we are playing offense.