Shortly after the infamous Billy Bush tape became public in October 2016, the story goes, officials with the Republican National Committee approached Donald Trump to inform him of a sobering reality: He would not become president.
In reality, recalled Sean Spicer, the then-communications director for the RNC, things went a bit differently. Yes, then-RNC Chairman Reince Priebus told Trump he believed that, as things stood, he would lose to Hillary Clinton. But they didn’t declare the door closed. Instead, they presented slides on the difficult path forward along with a synopsis of what Trump would have to do to change his fortunes.
On that list was a suggestion completely at odds with Trump’s id. He needed to lay low.
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“One of the things that was crucial was we had this swath of voters in battleground states that was fairly identical,” said Spicer. “About 6 percent of the electorate. They were solid Republican, high-propensity voters that had a problem with Trump's style. The case was they like your policies, they don’t like Hillary. Here’s what they want to hear, and here is what they don’t want to hear. That was important.”
Egged on by his top campaign advisers, Trump miraculously adopted the notion that less could, indeed, be more. He did few interviews in the close of the election and he dramatically dialed down his Twitter feed too. In the 20 days following the last presidential debate, he tweeted 233 times. That may still seem like the social media musings of an obsessive. But almost every single one of the tweets was utterly anodyne—the most provocative being some declaration that Clinton shouldn’t be allowed to run for president because of her email etiquette, practically a snoozefest by Trump standards.
“It’s simple—let’s do your talking at massive rallies—three, four, five or more a day—you’re a closer , she’s never closed anything,” recalled Steve Bannon, Trump's campaign CEO. “You’ve made your case, now let’s close your case.”
Approaching four years later, Trump faces longer odds, owing to a deadly pandemic, a flatlined economy, and a perception that the country is dangerously off course. Only this time, he doesn’t have massive rallies at which he can let out his internal steam. Nor is it clear if he has the willpower to bottle up his media outbursts.
After a lengthy hiatus, Trump has re-started his coronavirus press briefings. His supposed “new tone” has been overshadowed by Twitter rants on everything from concocted claims of voter fraud to baseless accusations that Barack Obama illegally spied on his campaign. And he’s sat down for interviews in which he’s made several rewind-to-make-sure-you-heard-it-right proclamations, like casually dismissing a daily COVID death count north of 1,000 and musing that the Civil Rights Act maybe wasn’t all that positive for African-Americans.
Spicer, for his part, said he thought Trump was heading in the right direction, having exhibited the discipline to cut down his press briefings to a relatively brief half-an-hour. But current and former Trump officials were less generous. The president’s interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan—during which he downplayed both the death count and the seminal civil rights law—was, as one senior administration official put it dryly, “not a high point in this presidency.”
So why does Trump do it?
Generally, there are two types of answers to that question, one political, the other psychological.
Politically, Trump’s defenders say that he possesses legitimately masterful skills at galvanizing voters and manipulating the media. For that reason, he must continue to speak. Like the executives of a bank begrudgingly hiring the person who robbed it to help them improve security, the Republican Party must turn to the man who put them on the precipice of electoral disaster to now rescue them.
Psychologically, the answers are trickier. But the general thrust is that Trump has a unique combination of ego, ambition, fear of ridicule, and tolerance for humiliation that few possess—if anyone at all. One top Democratic operative plainly stated that he has come to believe that the president is quite literally “addicted to press hits,” the endorphins rushing through his body as the camera’s red light signals in his direction. Tim O’Brien, one of the journalists who has most closely chronicled Trump’s life, offered a slightly more Darwinian explanation.
“His time in the spotlight in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and again in the ‘00s, spoiled him because he got away with that charade to a certain extent,” said O’Brien, who worked as a senior adviser to Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign. “The media wasn’t fact-checking him and reality-checking him on a daily basis the way it is now during his presidency. Yet because his bullshit-artistry was baked in decades ago he just keeps approaching everything in his life this way—not just pressers and interviews. Everything.”
To that point, where viewers, political observers, and many of Trump’s own senior officials watch some of his interviews and see bloodletting, Trump often sees victory. In the immediate aftermath of the Axios interview, the president told several people close to him how well he thought it turned out and what great television it had made, according to two people familiar with his private remarks on the matter.
“He said it went very well and that Biden could never stand up to that kind of questioning,” one of these sources said. “He absolutely was not mad about it.”
But if Trump believes, as O’Brien put it, that he “can control any problem through sheer force of will,” it may say as much about the political ecosystem in which he operates as it does about him. Trump may be unique in how brazen he is about it, but self-confidence and self-promotion are traits in abundance for most politicians. It’s just that he operates in a political system in which male politicians are not questioned for exhibiting those characteristics while female politicians are.
Tellingly, as Trump was plowing through interviews and press conferences with preternatural confidence that they’d restore him politically, Sen. Kamala Harris’ prospects as Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick were reportedly dimming because of fears that she was… too ambitious.
The notion that women are held to different standards than men in our political system is hardly revelatory. But the way Trump has operated in his presidency has put it into sharp focus and synthesized it in ways that have prompted difficult self-reflections among Democrats.
It is now treated as an article of faith within the party, for instance, that Trump didn’t win because he tapped into some secret electoral formula but, rather, because he was running against Hillary Clinton. Beyond that, there is a new-found empathy for characters that used to be the objects of derision.
Before Trump perfected the fusion of cultural resentment and political entertainment, Sarah Palin tried her hand at the act. Like Trump, the former Republican VP nominee sat down for interviews that were notable in their perceived calamity. And, like Trump, she was derided as being grossly out of her depth.
But Palin also faced lines of attack that Trump largely has not. She was accused of “going rogue,” of prioritizing her political future over her party, of not being worthy for the post she was seeking.
“I think it’s true that Palin was treated more harshly than a male candidate would have been,” Tommy Vietor, a top press aide for the Obama campaign, conceded.
The similarities between Trump and Palin are not perfect. And the criticisms that were lobbed at Palin during her time as a VP candidate were deserved, Democrats stress. But their trajectories do, to a certain degree, show the structural advantages that Trump enjoys. And they explain why a candidate who can be his own worst enemy seems likely to plow ahead rather than tone it down.
“[Palin] and Trump are cut from the same cloth. But because she was an ambitious woman, particularly upstaging a man held in high regard, people were hateful towards her in a way they would never be hateful towards any man,” said Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, a reproductive rights lobbying and advocacy organization. “Trump, when he was a candidate, no one ever said he had no right to be there. Whereas they did that with Palin.”
—with additional reporting by Asawin Suebsaeng
