 Arthur Solomon |
Media savvy followers of the political scene have long known that President Trump’s reactions to negative news involving him have had an affect of turning a single-day story into a multi-day story.
After the firing of FBI director James Comey yesterday, Trump’s action will be remembered forever as the “Tuesday Massacre” and comparable to Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973, when he fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox because he wouldn’t stop investigating Watergate.
Trump’s lame excuse for firing Comey was his mishandling of Hillary Clinton’s email woes leading up to the election. Of course, that reasoning was quickly ridiculed by the mainstream media, which pointed out that Trump praised Comey’s actions regarding Clinton during the campaign and that Comey could have been fired the first day Trump assumed the presidency if he really felt that way.
The firing gives credence to the notion that the FBI investigation was uncovering information proving there was collision on Trump’s part with the Russians despite his repeated claims otherwise.
Even if a new FBI director calls off the investigation, the cloud cover over the Trump presidency will remain until the last day of his tenure. Trump’s place in presidential history is now secured, but certainly not in a manner he would like, and nothing Trump and his supporters can say will lift that cloud. The firing will definitely become campaign fodder for the 2018 and 2020 elections, and along with the botched repeal of Obamacare, will keep GOP candidates on the defensive.
Given Democrats’ ineffectual history during recent campaigns, even the recent gold platter handed to them may not be enough to take back Congress and the presidency unless fresh thinking replaces the stale strategy of appealing to different facets of our society with different messages. What’s needed is a message that appeals to all Americans, as Trump’s “Make America Great” did, regardless of its simplicity.
The Comey firing also probably has editors at the New York Times and Washington Post gearing up for another Woodward and Bernstein Watergate style investigation.
Trump’s Russia investigation has put the President in crisis mode since he first announced his candidacy. Given his thin skin and reactions to negative media coverage, that crisis will surely grow only worse. His tweets are losing their effectiveness, as is his label of “fake news” for every story with which he disagrees. The media is no longer playing into his once-effective strategy of covering his tweets instead of covering news as it should be covered. Trump’s PR advisors have achieved the impossible. They have been less effective than Clinton’s and Obama’s PR strategy combined.
By his actions, what Trump has done is demonstrate how to make a PR crisis worse. A title for the upcoming film on the subject should be “All The President’s Men, A Sequel.”
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Arthur Solomon was a senior VP at Burson-Marsteller. He now is a contributor to public relations and sports business publications, consults on PR projects and was on the Seoul Peace Prize nominating committee. He can be reached at [email protected].
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