The Trump PR Train Picks Up a New Caboose
If nothing else Trump flacks know how to play the media. Years of reality show experience have made his PR team experts at hyping their boss. Consider this string of tweets:
- How Trump wins
- Rubio and Kasich cozying up to Trump
- Palin has tangled with Ailes in the past and has her own audience. She could turn them against if there’s another feud.
- If his thesis is right then we could have a President Trump
- Roger Ailes Is Starting to Sweat Trump’s Megyn Kelly Technique
- Trump is using Ailes’s own playbook against Fox and doing it at a higher level.
- Trump’s position now is he is chairman of his company and he will only deal with Murdoch at a chairman-to-chairman level
- How is Trump able to fight Fox? Short answer: “testicular fortitude”
- Every turning point in Ailes’s career ended with a public meltdown.
- Limbaugh siding with Trump over Fox is massive news. Ailes first produced Limbaugh’s TV show in early 90s. Limbaugh audience is Fox audience
- Why Trump has more leverage than Fox
- Trump’s rally was for the faithful. Also allows him to not get beat up at debate
- Kelly promotes her upcoming post-debate interview with Cruz. That’s a shot at Trump. Wow.
- Megyn boosting Trump’s biggest rivals, Rubio, Cruz.
- Megyn’s show seems like an Ailes production. Encircle Trump by promoting conservative alternative (Cruz) and establishment choice (Rubio)
- Megyn on Cruz: “He showed up. He should be given credit for that.”
- Megan’s post-debate show seems like an effort to bury Trump.
- 48 years of Trump in NYC! A (highly entertaining) NYMag retrospective
- Off-air Kelly tells Cruz that Trump is like “Voldermort”
Spoiler alert: this isn’t a stream of tweets from the Trump campaign, no matter how much it reads like one. This is journalist and Fox nemesis Gabriel Sherman. The man whose alleged “sources” said Roger Ailes was disconnected and uninvolved, an “absentee” CEO of a rudderless company. Only to flip-flop 180 degrees to claim Ailes was so hands-on he was personally writing the network’s PR releases! The same sources who insisted Ailes was in big trouble, only to have the New York Times report that Murdoch had in fact given Ailes his support. But then again Gabriel Sherman’s dubious reporting has become the stuff of legend.
Now Sherman’s material reads like a PR-wire for Donald Trump. His articles gush over Trump’s brilliance. His twitter feed parrots the Trump line with embarrassing symmetry. CNN (which spends the most air time on Trump) and MSNBC (where Joe Scarborough’s ongoing Trumpgasm has reduced him to a laughingstock) love to bring on Gabe because he’s a voice against Fox News. It doesn’t matter to them how inaccurate or false his statements are, but then again it doesn’t matter to Sherman either. Look again at that last tweet:
This plays perfectly into Trump’s meme that Megyn Kelly is biased against him, and Sherman’s tweet got the effect he wanted. But it’s a misrepresentation that deliberately omits the context:
In the Harry Potter series, “Voldermort” [sic] was the arch-villain so evil that people dare not even speak his name. There was some talk with Megyn that her guests and others kept referring to Trump in that same fashion: without using his name. Her reference to this clumsy wording was nothing more than that. Mind you, the Cable Gamer wasn’t the only one to notice this. As we hit “publish” Sherman has yet to clarify, revise, or apologize for the false impression he left.
The Cable Gamer doesn’t think it’s a good thing when Presidential candidates threaten reporters (an incident Mr. Sherman has made surprisingly little mention of). But Gabriel Sherman is on board the Trump train; he’s made common cause with Trump and his campaign of insults and intimidation. Gabe’s credibility may take another hit, but for a while he can enjoy being a PR flack without portfolio for the loudest voice in the room.
The Cable Game 
You’re sure right about Scarborough and his Trumpgasm. What happened to that guy?? I remember him from Scarborough Country and the early days of Morning Joe as a conservative Reagan Republican whom I liked and “real conservatives” considered a RINO. This was also when Mika was an annoying, smirking, unabashed liberal. Now they’re both on the Trump Train and it’s unwatchable.
The other day Joe told a show he might consider a VP run with Trump, then hours later retracted it. Next morning? More Trumpgasm. Nobody bothered to mention that little bit of nothing about WANTING TO BE TRUMP’S VP. Joe and Mika and most of the rest of MSNBC have lost their damn minds.
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