Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law has discussed the possibility of a Trump-branded television network with a friend who has helped guide such deals.
.. Within Mr. Trump’s campaign, top aides over the summer made reference to the possibility of running a media holding after the election, guided by the belief that the Republican nominee would win and such a property could help bolster his agenda
.. But Mr. Trump himself is said to have expressed limited enthusiasm for the idea of “Trump TV.”
.. Mr. Trump, who historically gets investors for his major projects, seems unlikely to put in large amounts of his own cash into a potentially risky venture.
The father-daughter investors Rebekah and Robert Mercer, who are said to have funded Breitbart operations and who are now supporting Mr. Trump, also do not appear to have the money to finance such an operation on their own.
Goldberg: Trump’s Nutter News Network (NNN) Strategy
Yes, the media is particularly biased against Donald Trump. But this is not quite the outrage Trump’s spinners want to make it. Not only is Trump an exceptionally unworthy presidential candidate on the merits, but he does everything he possibly can to maximize the endemic problems of liberal-media bias. Thanks to his lizard-brain narcissism, he would rather have awful headlines about himself and be the center of attention than have Hillary Clinton steal the limelight.
.. Yes, absolutely, the WikiLeaks e-mails provide countless vulnerabilities that might have destroyed Hillary’s candidacy if she were running against any conventional Republican. But it’s not liberal-media bias per se that causes the press to pay outsized attention to tales of sexual misconduct; the press always pays attention to sex. The Lewinsky scandal got a lot of media attention. You could look it up.
.. It was inevitable and obvious that this lecherous adulterer who bragged in print about cheating on his wife would have these skeletons in his enormous, gold-and-velvet-lined closet. But no one needed to be a master sleuth or even a run-of-the-mill opposition researcher to know this. You know why? Because this guy said so! When accused of being a sexual predator by Howard Stern, Trump said, “That’s true!” — and then he laughed (in front of his daughter, whom he has affectionately called “a piece of ass”).
.. But, he also said that he couldn’t run for political office because of his attitude toward women:
“I think women are beautiful — I think certain women are more beautiful than others, to be perfectly honest — and it is fortunate that I don’t have to run for political office.”
.. Even if you wanted to think the best of a man who disparages war heroes but insists that dodging the clap was his “personal Vietnam,” a serious political party would have still demanded that he submit to an internal opposition-research investigation.
.. Trump refused to let his own campaign do an inventory of his skeletons. The guy who hires the best people was implored by thepeople he hired to do this basic form of due diligence and he refused. And now we’re supposed to be shocked that the Clintons found the skeletons in question? Or that the press is eager to report on them?
.. Take for example, the bowel-stewed hysteria over Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” comment. Romney said — and did — exactly what feminists and liberal reporters should applaud. He wanted to hire qualified women. So he reached out to women’s groups for suggestions. They sent him lots of recommendations. Binders full of them. And then he hired many of the women listed in the binders. What a monster!
.. So let’s talk about these allegations against Trump. I think they’re true. Maybe not all of them, but certainly enough of them, not least because they conform to what Trump confessed to in an unguarded moment. But also because we can be sure that at least some of them were given to the media by Democrats who would have made sure to vet them.
.. If you’re looking for a theory to explain what Trump and Campaign CEO Steve Bannon — the former head of Breitbart News —are doing, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than this fanciful notion that he’s trying to become president.
.. Or maybe that’s the rationalization they throw out there to distract from the more realistic goal: the launch of Nutter News Network.
.. Read the transcript of Trump’s speech from Thursday railing about the globalist corporate-media conspiracy. It might as well be the mission statement for Bannon’s new enterprise, a network that stands up to the global cabal
.. Why has Trump done scores of interviews on Fox and virtually nowhere else the last two months? Because he’s not interested in winning over undecideds, independents, or swing voters — you know the sort of thing serious presidential candidates do. No, he’s reselling the same product to people who’ve already bought it so he can take the customers with him after the election.
.. Because he wants the faithful to be permanently alienated from the rest of the political culture and utterly reliant on him. In fairness, it’s also because he can’t tolerate the idea that people will reasonably conclude that he’s a loser and choker so he has to lay the groundwork for the claim the other side cheated. But that narcissistic insecurity just makes him all the more susceptible to Bannon’s manipulation. He was such a Bannon puppet yesterday you could almost see Bannon’s fingers moving in the back of Trump’s mouth.
.. All of the idiotic arguments his cheerleaders made a year ago have been exposed as the magical-thinking B.S. they always were. He can win blue states! Name one. He’s expanding the GOP coalition! Really? Then why are Republican Senate candidates outperforming Trump in almost every battleground state?
The Trump-Ailes Buddy Act
Mr. Trump even went on TV to accuse Ms. Carlson of being a fabulist. (Maybe he didn’t know that Ms. Carlson had a year’s worth of audio recordings of Mr. Ailes’s lewd remarks.)
.. in June in an article in Vanity Fair. Connecting the dots, the article surmised that Mr. Trump’s reality-TV outrageousness, the billions in free coverage he’s generated, his 11 million Twitter followers, and his die-hard base of white supremacists, could all be used to form an alt-right TV powerhouse.
.. Mr. Ailes, the man whose behavior forced Fox to make this apology last week: “We sincerely regret and apologize for the fact that Gretchen was not treated with the respect and dignity that she and all of our colleagues deserve.”
The Challenge of Rebranding Donald Trump
Talking with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly earlier this week, Trump appeared to be edging toward a deportation policy not much different from the one adopted by the Obama Administration. “What people don’t know is that Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country,” he said. “Lots of people were brought out of the country with the existing laws. Well, I’m going to do the same thing.” Then, speaking to CNN on Thursday night, he backtracked, saying that under a Trump Administration all undocumented immigrants would have to leave the country before applying for legal status.
.. In many rebrandings, there is a tension between the urgent need to change public perceptions of the company and the danger of alienating existing customers and stakeholders.
.. A successful rebranding campaign has to have two elements. It must be surprising enough to attract people’s attention and make them think again about a company or product. And it must be credible.
This exercise never passed the credibility test. In 2005, a BP-owned refinery in Texas blew up, killing twenty-five people; in 2006, a pipeline owned by BP failed in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, spilling hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude; and, in 2010, the BP-owned Deepwater Horizon rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in a huge oil spill that threatened the entire Gulf Coast. Six years later, BP is still struggling to recover from a huge hit to its finances and reputation.
.. The “Beyond Petroleum” fiasco proved that you can’t deny who you are.
.. If he’s looking for guidance from the corporate world, Trump could do worse than reading up on the recent history of McDonald’s
.. It was all partly a con, of course. As McDonald’s broadened its menu choices, it still sold huge amounts of unhealthy fried food.
.. McDonald’s turnaround came “not from greater sales of healthy foods but from selling more fast-food basics, like double cheeseburgers and fried chicken sandwiches
.. McDonald’s rebranding was effective because it challenged perceptions of the company without undermining its core value proposition: cheapness and convenience
.. Given how central immigration has been to Trump’s campaign, announcing a more humane approach toward the undocumented could send a forceful signal that he is willing to compromise
.. He’d also need to do some damage control with his base, of course. If he does change tack on deportations, he could also make clear that he still intends to build a wall across the southern border, and to make it much harder for foreigners from other parts of the world, particularly Muslims
.. Kellyanne Conway, the veteran Republican polling expert he brought on as his campaign manager, is reportedly pushing for a U-turn on immigration, and so is Chris Christie.
.. Is he in it to win? Or is his real goal to build up the Trump brand among conservatives and ultra-conservatives, perhaps with the ultimate ambition of launching a media venture?
.. If winning is a secondary concern, it might make more sense to stick with his existing policy and preserve his image as a conservative renegade.