Don’t take the bait
Another day, another round of leaks about all the scary things Donald Trump will do when he’s magically back in charge of the country. He’ll be a dictator. His cabinet will be full of monsters. He’ll put everyone he doesn’t like in prison. It’s important to understand that these kinds of leaks are coming from Trump’s own people, and it’s important to understand why we shouldn’t necessarily take the bait on it.
The more obvious it becomes that Trump is finished (senility, prison), the more his handlers try to cover for it by leaking scary things about what he’ll do when he’s in charge again. Their goal is to make sure the headlines are about how dangerously powerful Trump is, instead of how weak and broken and vulnerable he is.
And it’s working. Donald Trump is so plainly senile, he no longer knows who the current President is or what year it is. He now goes around talking about how he eats too much and how fat he is. He’s not even the same person anymore. And yet in spite of this, all the headlines are about how he’s somehow more powerful than ever.
Trump and his people want the messaging to be that he’s more dangerously powerful than ever. So your messaging about him should, obviously, be the opposite. Trump wants you out there talking about how powerful he is. So you should be out there talking about how weak he is, how broken he is, how senile he is, how he’s nothing more than a helpless criminal defendant awaiting trial.
Why on earth would you ever give your opponent the gift of helping him put the narrative out there about himself that he wants out there? Trump and his handlers obviously think that he benefits if the narrative is that he’s a dangerously powerful dictator. So we should obviously go with the opposite narrative, which also happens to be the factual truth: he’s a broken down senile loser who’s being swallowed up by criminal charges and can’t possibly be considered a functioning candidate for anything.
As long as we keep allowing Trump to set the narrative that he’s a supremely powerful dictator, and as long as we keep helping him amplify his preferred narrative, then we’re just taking the bait, and he’s playing us. We’ve got to stop giving Trump the narrative that he wants, and start being savvy enough to give Trump the opposite of the narrative that he wants. Trump wants to be seen as being stronger than ever? We need to portray him as being weaker than ever. It’s that simple.
