Week in Review, Trump, Wells Fargo, Ryan

Speaking with TJ Walker, the show where we dissect how and what world class leaders communicate. Welcome to the weekend edition of Speaking with DJ Walker. It has been one of the most truly bizarre weeks in the history of news, presidential politics and communication. With so many fast breaking stories happening not just daily, hourly, but seemingly by the minute. It's pretty difficult to just lop things off and, and try to do a weekend summary. But I'm going to do the best that I can with the idea that by the time you listen to this, things may have been so topsy turvy change that it's all irrelevant. Donald Trump has gone through again, I don't know how to describe it other than to say the most wildly bizarre week of any politician ever in the history of presidential politics. One week ago and I'm recording this Friday afternoon at 3:22 Eastern Time. So it's been almost seven days to the hour since it was released. The audio and videotape of Donald Trump talking about how he can do whatever he wants with women and grab their. Well, you've heard it before, you don't have to have me repeat it. Now that then led to the debate Sunday night where Donald Trump vehemently denied ever doing anything improper towards women, saying it was just locker room talk. That in turn inspired a number of women to say, wait a minute, he did exactly that. He grabbed all sorts of our body parts. And it started off with a trickle, but it's been growing and at this point I've lost count. It's over. It's we're in double digits, put it that way, with no end in sight. Now the interesting thing is that a number of Republican senators, officials, House members that initially ran away from Donald Trump last weekend got so much pressure from the base of the party to support Donald Trump that a number of them have now come now come back to Donald Trump and are once again saying they are supporting him and they're voting for him. Polling data suggests that so far this has been a big hit. Whereas before the story broke, most national polls had Hillary Clinton 2 to 4 points ahead, now she is 4, 5, 6, even 10, 11 points ahead in polls, including the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal poll. So not exactly a source of liberal bias. It has been a truly bizarre week. Donald Trump has in some ways followed the textbook example of what to do in a crisis and that he hasn't defended. Part of what I stress with my own clients is when you're defending, you're losing. You are better off attacking. Donald Trump has done that. He's attacked the news. And by the way, I should point out, he's not a client of mine. But Trump has attacked the media. He's attacked Hillary Clinton, he's attacked, well, really anyone and everyone. And that is shoring up his, his political base. Is it doing anything to build in new voters, to attract new voters, to attract independent voters, to attract undecided voters? Certainly there's nothing in the polling data to suggest that. And all of my years, you know, 30 plus years experience in dealing with the media and politics, not seeing how he's doing anything to actually advance his vote total to anything even close to a plural, forget majority, I'm not seeing him do anything to help his cause at all. Now, I've heard from a number of people, especially Trump supporters, saying, isn't this unfair of the media? Isn't this awful? They're now taking all these allegations unvetted from women. Well, here's the difference, folks. And a lot of conservatives like to talk about Bill Clinton. Here's the thing about Bill Clinton. He hasn't been on the ballot this century when he ran for president, we're talking about more than a quarter of a century ago. So from the Hillary Clinton standpoint, the more conservatives and the more Republicans and the more Donald Trump want to talk about Bill Clinton, I think their attitude is great, have at it. Because there's simply no evidence that talking about Bill Clinton and his frailties, his weaknesses, his flaws, is doing anything whatsoever to hurt Hillary Clinton's vote count. It makes a lot of people speculate that Donald Trump's real agenda is not in fact winning this election, but setting himself up to be beloved by a core set of supporters, the so called alt right supporters, far right conservatives who will follow him into a new media venture, a new online Trump tv, because it just doesn't comport with any sort of standard crisis communication strategy, political strategy, any kind of strategy for anything. And at some level, I have to say I'm mystified. On the other hand, it's totally consistent with how Trump has behaved, not just in the last year and a quarter that he's been in this campaign, but really his entire life. His whole attitude has always seemed to be all publicity is good publicity. And when you are in the media business or in the developing business and you're happy with 1, 2% of the market, that's a great strategy. Politics really is different. Politics is a situation where it's a one day sale and if you don't get a majority of all the customers or at least a very strong plurality. You're out of business forever, at least as far as that political office is involved. And that's frankly why a lot of people who are strong media figures, whether it's Pat Buchanan, whether it is, you could name figures on the liberal and the conservative side in media who've tried to enter the political arena. It often doesn't work. Well, it's because it's a different game. There simply is a different skill set of appealing to a majority versus plurality. Look at someone like Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh is wildly successful at this point, has generated not millions, billions and billions of dollars of revenue for his radio companies, and at this point, in excess of a billion dollars for himself. And he's done it by speaking to 20 million people or so each week on the radio. Out of a country of 300 million. That is a relatively tiny percentage. We're talking about, oh, 10% of the adult population. And that makes him the most successful talk radio host ever. But it wouldn't get him the presidency. And it may be that Donald Trump can now become the most successful talk radio host or most successful online TV host, or maybe even cable tv. I seriously doubt that any cable news network is going to want to touch him right now. Who knows? It's possible. But that's the difference between the media world and the political world, is what works in one really doesn't necessarily work in the other. If I had to choose between Al Gore and Bill Clinton, Donald Trump to build a TV show or a radio show around, and all I wanted to do was make money, no way would I pick Bill Clinton or Al Gore. Donald Trump is going to be a bigger draw. He resonates with a core audience in a much more forceful way than Bill Clinton or Al Gore would. So it's just a different game. So still about four weeks left in this presidential race, and it's only going to get more interesting, folks, and more exciting and more desperate next week. Next Wednesday will be the third and final presidential debate. At this point, the Hillary Clinton campaign is going into a safe and secure mode. They are reducing the number of campaign events she's doing. They're certainly limiting her media opportunities. At this point, their attitude is basically, let's hide. Let's just let everyone focus on Donald Trump. The charges, the accusations about Donald Trump. Let's just duck. And I happen to think that is a strategy that makes complete sense. Why be out there, why be taking unnecessary risks when it seems as though Donald Trump is doing his very best? To light himself on fire. So I don't think we're going to see much from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Meanwhile, you have Barack Obama, you have Michelle Obama making very, very forceful speeches, quite emotional, getting tremendous positive coverage, all with themes that, while not necessarily stirring recommendations and endorsements of Hillary Clinton, although they do, are just forceful denunciations of Donald Trump. Again, unprecedented, ladies and gentlemen. I haven't seen it in my lifetime. People who are a lot older than I am haven't seen it. You could say there was a little bit of this back in 64 where you had psychiatrists publicly stating that Barry Goldwater was psychologically unfit to be president. And, I mean, I was a year and a half old in that campaign and obviously have no recollection of it. But beyond that, we are in uncharted territory, and it's causing a lot of communication conundrums and challenges for many, many, many people. When you look at what's going on with Republican office holders, House members, Senate members, they are really caught in a difficult situation because they're getting tremendous pressure from supporters and contributors to denounce Donald Trump, to separate themselves from him. But then when they do, they're getting angry, angry denunciation from people in their own party who are strong Trump supporters and feel like they're kicking a man when he's down, that they're betraying the party. This tension is being fought out most vigorously in the form of Speaker Paul Ryan. He is absolutely in a no win situation. He has backed away from Donald Trump and he's being denounced for that. But he's also being denounced by people who say that Trump is the worst thing that has ever happened to the Republican Party. And anyone who doesn't denounce Trump is going to be tainted, not just later this year, but in 2018 and 2020, and indeed for the rest of their careers. So you have a lot of top Republican strategists who genuinely do not know what is the best message to communicate. So they're trying to have it both ways. It's kind of like, well, we don't really support Trump, but we're not denouncing him either. We don't really support everything Trump stands for, but we're not endorsing Hillary Clinton either. It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out, not just on Election Day, but in the aftermath. You now have some top Republicans, like Steve Schmidt, who was a top strategist for John McCain in the 2008 campaign, openly predicting that the Republican Party is going to split into two, you're going to have sort of a traditional conservative, small government, low taxes, less regulation, traditional values, Republican Party on the one hand. And you're going to have another Republican Party that is more of the populist Donald Trump variety, stressing messages of economic nationalism, anti immigration, anti trade agreement, and a Republican Party that has messages that are wildly divergent from what we've seen in the Reagan era in the last 30 years. If that happens, of course, it's going to make it extremely easy for the Democratic Party to maintain its dominance at the presidential level and perhaps move on to the Senate, congressional and gubernatorial level. If you do see that the Republican Party essentially split into two, we'll be following that very closely and how that is communicated on a regular basis here on speaking with TJ Walker. In other news, fascinating week at Wells Fargo. John Stump, the CEO, forced to testify in front of Congress. That did not go well at all. It was such a disastrous performance that he's gone. Wells Fargo got rid of their CEO. This is seen as a huge victory for people like Senator Elizabeth Warren and a defeat, obviously, for John Stump. Wells Fargo in the news for wildly mishandling itself, basically having a lot of their executives just fabricate credit card accounts at a massive, massive scale. And a lot of Americans are upset about it. Elizabeth Warren went on a tirade and she spoke for a lot of Americans. Elizabeth Warren, who many people would have loved to see run against Hillary Clinton. Elizabeth Warren, much more economically populist, much more someone seen as standing up to big banks, is seen as one of the top leaders of the Democratic Party. She, of course, rose to prominence in her campaign just a few years ago for the Senate with a little handheld video, I believe it was someone's cell phone, where she encapsulated people's anger with Wall street, with the whole housing bubble, with everything going on in finance. It was just a little snippet, I believe, about one minute video. And to me, she's a perfect example of the power of speaking. It doesn't matter how good the production values are. In her case, it was a little shaky, sort of secretive video, but it catapulted her into the Senate and has brought her to prominence ever since. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. These weekends we have sort of a special show where I give you my analysis of top news stories of the day and the communication elements. What worked, what didn't work, who's, who's communicating effectively, who's not communicating. I'd love to hear from you if there are topics you'd like me to cover, please send me an email tjediatraining Worldwide. You can also communicate by Twitter jwalker. As always, this show is brought to you by Media Training Worldwide. Do you have an upcoming speech, media interview or podcast you're trying to prepare for? Well, we're here to help you at absolutely no charge. I'll send you my online media training and presentation training course and a couple of my books. All you have to do is click on the link in the show notes or just go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and click on the links and I'll send you the course and the books at absolutely no charge. I'm T.J. walker. See you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to speaking with T.J. walker.