They know it’s not working
The thing about a wannabe strongman like Donald Trump is that he really, really wants you to believe he’s getting away with anything he wants. In fact he needs you to believe it – and not just because he’s a narcissist. He needs you to believe he’s getting away with anything he wants, because otherwise he’s by definition no longer a strongman.
This is why I’ve spent so many years arguing against rhetoric like “Oh no, he’s getting away with it all, he can’t be stopped, we’re doomed.” That’s the message Trump wants out there. And why should we serve as his publicist? The key to defeating someone like Trump is to continually look for his weaknesses, vulnerabilities, ineptitude, and – most importantly – failures.
Each time Trump swings and misses, it makes him look incrementally weaker in the eyes of the general public. It causes people to start doubting whether he’s going to be able to pull off the strongman routine or not. And the weaker he looks, the easier it becomes to rally people against him. After all, if you’re not invincible, you’re defeatable.
In that regard, Trump is increasingly showing his weakness and vulnerability by the day. It’s not just that he fails to win anyone over with his incoherent public appearances. It’s not just that he keeps losing in court over and over again. And it’s not just that he and his henchmen keep shooting themselves in the foot with rookie mistakes like Signalgate. It’s that Trump and his people are losing the messaging war – and while a senile Trump may not know it, his people do.
How do we know this? For months, Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has been shamelessly going on television and making the case for Trump’s tariffs. Anyone who’s ever taken an economics class, or studied history, knows that tariff-based trade wars don’t work. Yet Lutnick is still willing to go out there and pretend that Trump’s tariffs make some kind of sense. Except not anymore.
Yesterday, CBS Face The Nation announced on air that it had been planning to have Lutnick as its guest, but that the Trump White House declined the request. If Lutnick were simply unavailable, the Trump regime would have simply sent someone else to make the tariff argument in his place. But by refusing to send Lutnick or anyone else yesterday, the Trump White House tacitly admitted that it knows its tariff messaging isn’t winning anyone over. In fact Trump’s people have apparently concluded that Trump’s tariffs are such an unpopular disaster that no messaging is better than pro-tariff messaging.
It’s a bit unfortunate that the Trump regime has figured this out this early on. I was hoping they’d keep sending people out there to make sure everyone in America knows that this tariff mess, and the resulting price spikes and inflation, are something that Trump chose to make happen. But by now everyone is probably figuring that out anyway. Even if some folks don’t quite grasp that Trump did this to the economy on purpose, the public has a way of blaming the President for economic trouble anyway. So this is going to hang around Trump’s neck.
But I really think the story here is that Trump’s own top people – the ones who decide who gets sent onto television to do Trump’s messaging – have figured out that it’s just not working. There’s no getting the public to buy what Trump is selling. And the worse consumer sentiment on the economy gets, the harder it’ll be for Trump to pull off the other aspects of his evil agenda.
