Grading the Donald Trump PR Reset: Mission Accomplished or Old Man Yells at Cloud?

My 19-year-old kid loved Donald Trump’s speech for two reasons:

1. He’s Army Cavalry and likes free money (and how!).
2. He suspects someone in the White House was stealing my PR ideas, which means his Old Man must be powerful and important.

When Trump announced a $1,776 check for military members, my kid’s first comment was, “Wow, the strip clubs near the bases are gonna make lots of money!” And I’m sure he’s right.

(Merry Christmas, boys and girls!)

But I don’t think he’s right about #2. The White House PR team probably read the same tea leaves I did, which led them to the same conclusion.

To refresh your memory, nine days ago I wrote a primer on solving the so-called “affordability” PR crisis. We had three talking points — all leading the audience to a very specific outcome:

Specifically, we want to remind the American people that inflation exploded under President Biden — and Trump has been working 24/7 to clean up Biden’s historic mess. Additionally, we’ve already achieved so much! In key categories, prices have already dropped! 

(Even though the mainstream media tells you the opposite.)

We want the American people to believe:

1. Inflation was the fault of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
2. Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s plan to fix the economy is already working. We might not be out of the woods yet, but we’ve made extraordinary progress.
3. If we continue the Trump-GOP plan, the economy will roar, wealth will grow, and an age of peace and prosperity will be upon us. The LAST thing we should do is give the economic keys back to the same Dems who crashed the economy in the first place!

That’s where we’re leading our audience: BIDEN was the problem; TRUMP is the solution.

And to the letter, that was EXACTLY the message of President Trump’s primetime TV address. From a PR perspective, he framed the so-called “affordability crisis” absolutely perfectly: It was a 10 out of 10. 

Couldn’t ask for a better framing.

Congrats to the president’s PR team! Well done!

(But if Trump introduces the B.I.D.E.N. Pain Index next week, yeah, I WILL be taking a victory lap.) 

With all due respect to Frank Luntz, his quick-take methodology for evaluating speeches and debates — where his focus groups flip different dials when they hear/see things they like and don’t like — is a load of garbage. The human mind doesn’t evaluate ideas that way; we don’t critique TV performances moment-to-moment on a 10-point must system.

Life isn’t a collection of individual moments magnified.

Instead, a few days after the event, we remember a few big things: impressions, emotions, takeaways.

Getting the most clicks on the Frank Luntz happy-meter is frickin’ meaningless. 

What truly matters is what the audience thinks on days two, three, four, and five. We want to win the game of long-term impressions, emotions, and takeaways.

Here, I suspect Donald Trump’s speech will be highly successful. The storyline was easy to follow — Biden broke it; Trump fixed it — and it appealed to our God-given sense of optimism: We’re on the verge of a new golden age! 

The best is yet to come!

Long-term, there’s a PR danger in overpromising and underdelivering, but for the here-and-now, Trump’s messaging was perfect.

The mainstream media reaction has been almost 100% negative, but that’s okay. We lost ‘em at the beginning, because they vehemently disagreed with the central premise: Biden was a disaster, and Trump inherited a mess.

But they’re not our target audience. Trump wasn’t talking to them; he was talking to the American people.

Recommended: What the Hell Was Susie Wiles Thinking?

You can also disregard the silly critique that President Trump did too much shouting or spoke too quickly — i.e. the Abe Simpson “old man yells at cloud” meme:

Trump knows that the same media that ignored Biden’s mental decline are salivating like vultures, ready to pounce at his first symptoms. That’s the PR card they’re hoping to play.

Overemphasizing Trump’s roar and vigor was tactically smart.

I’m also delighted that Trump used graphs and charts to highlight the price-decline of relatable household items. That’s something I’ve begged the president to do since Nov. 19:

Pick five relatable indicators of inflation. Doesn’t matter what five you pick, as long as it makes sense to the average household. (It could be the price of eggs, a gallon of gas, the cost of milk — whatever.) But we need to “package” these stats in a comprehensive way, to remind the American people how bad things were under Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, and how much progress we’ve already made under President Trump.

The mainstream media won’t tell our story for us. We need to do it ourselves.

And that’s precisely what President Trump accomplished last night: He clearly framed the problem, passionately told his story, and sold the glorious benefits of his solution. Whereas the Democrats are promising a miserable future of pain and doom, President Trump just offered the American people a legit reason for optimism.

It’s the kind of speech that grows in stature in the audience’s mind. 

But not just the speech: It’ll also reflect well on the speaker, putting to pasture the Biden “old man” comparisons. Instead, the audience’s lingering impression of President Trump will be that he’s a high-energy whirlwind who’s deeply excited about the future — and still going strong.

Ignore the naysayers. That was a terrific PR reset. I give it an A.

Now, we just gotta deliver on the economy.

One Last Thing: The Democrats are on the run, but make no mistake: The donkeys are still dangerous. We need your help to succeed! 

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Happy Holidays!