What Team Trump Must Do Now

Free Advice on Derailing Derailment, From a Former Political Consultant

With the conclusion of the US election, the thrill has set in for half the country: that we have a chance to re-secure our nation and its ideals. The other half of the nation, however, is in shock and even in a state of mourning.

Meanwhile, in only two days, the drumbeats of “resistance” from that half of the country have begun to sound: Rep Eric Swalwell encouraged his allies on X not to “Go[...] quietly”. This is dangerously inflammatory language, and it warns of a potential Democratic resistance to a peaceful transfer of power.

Insta-marches have begun — as I warned, warned, warned you for months would be the case — in Chicago and then, tick-tock, Philadelphia. Expect more. The tell-tale identically printed signs and instantly-amassed crowds don’t mean that these protests do not present a threat to the newly elected transition team. There will be more eruptions across the country, more instability, more threats to a peaceful transition of power. These will accompany of course power outages, national security crises or “crises”, legal challenges, and other messes, November and December and right up into January.

My point is that these are not just tactical eruptions targeted at actually unseating President Trump and his new team. That is unlikely to be directly successful.

What these are, as President Trump and his advisors should quickly understand, are efforts by my former colleagues in the media and the political establishments to change the subject so as to undermine or derail President Trump’s mandate and to dilute his political capital.

In other words, there is an urgent lesson that the last Trump administration never fully grasped: successful politics is not just transactional. It is also narrative, and mythological, and iconic.

In that wisdom lies the secret power of great kings and Queens, and great Presidents.

President Trump is a businessman, and so thinks, reasonably enough given his field, that applause should follow actual achievements. This is a misleading expectation, however, in Presidential messaging. What audiences applaud is what they have been led to understand has happened to them that is positive, via their having been told a powerful, proactive story.

While President Trump has been in media forever, he and his advisors have not mastered the art of telling a proactive symbolic and iconic political story. They tend to be highly reactive to adverse news coverage and to criticism, which is one of their most concerning vulnerabilities, as this continually misleads them into reactive media strategies.

President Trump’s engagement with the media, and even with live crowds, has insulated him to an extent, and that is a risk at this critical moment in his pre-Presidency. President Trump is used to dealing with “fake media” that continually lie about him no matter what — so in his calculus, he does not need to win them over at all. He is also used to speaking live to adoring crowds. So he is not used to speaking live to people who are unsure of him, or to people who actively hate and fear him.

But his task right now is to make it impossible for the “fake media” to disregard the positive points of his policy initiatives and the great news of his transition’s personnel decisions.

President Trump also urgently needs to lay to rest the active, traumatized fears of the half of the country that did not vote for him and especially of the millions who have been so propagandized by legacy media that they are in active states of apprehension and of grief.

Unfortunately this kind of messaging requires a whole different set of skills and talking points, than did campaigning. President Trump does not, respectfully, understand how to reach past the hostile media to craft a political and mythological narrative that reaches directly to audiences, including what are now — we hope temporarily — hostile audiences.

Why is this such an urgent problem to fix, like this week, like today?

Because this should be a moment in which from the Trump camp issue powerful visual scenes of triumph and blessing and unity for all Americans — even for the ones who hate and fear him.

I appreciate that the Trump and RFK Jr teams are working hard making hires and crafting policies. But in the media vacuum since President Trump was last onstage, enemies of the new American Alignment, including China, are hard at work — churning out, often with the amplification assistance of AI and Chinese-owned TikTok, those insta-protests, as well as “white supremacy” messaging, end-of-democracy messaging, online threats, and video after video of young women’s grief and distress.

The goal of President Trump’s enemies, foreign and domestic, via propaganda and protests, is to whip half the country up into a state of such amygdala-driven fear and rage that they can no longer reason; and so they will accept any crackdown on the peaceful transition to power.

So President Trump and his team need to pre-empt this messaging by getting a powerful message out front that derails it.

Here are my bullet points about how to do that.

1/ Surrogates, shut up and stop your online gloating. The Trump Campaign belatedly got their MAGA surrogates online and in independent media, to stick to disciplined messaging and talking points. The need for this discipline has not ended just because Trump won.

Just because MAGA had a Presidential win, it does not mean that this is the time to let the right’s impulsive, less-mature beasts out of their cages; to the contrary. The time to stick to strict message discipline is today, tomorrow, and for the next four years.

Victory does not mean license — it means even greater discipline, unless you want it all to go to hell.

The opposition wants MAGA surrogates and influencers to sound crude, uneducated, aggressive, misogynist, racist and lacking in empathy. Don’t take the bait.

So: stop making fun of liberal women crying in videos online.

I know, in the conservative media bubble, that you all think these videos and “over-reactions” are ridiculous. But never waste time mocking your opponents, especially in defeat. Learn from their fears and then respect and address their fears.

Women are really scared. Young women are really scared. They have been told they may die in botched back alley abortions now. This is not a trivial fear — it is existential. Others demographic groups fear a racist or Christian Nationalist tyranny.

You all may think those fears are nonsensical, but that would be a mistake.

President Trump and his primary allies —- RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Nicole Shanahan — the women on his team especially — need to be out front every single day with speeches that repeat talking points that allay these fears. Every day they need to give speeches that repeat talking points about peace, equality, unity, inclusiveness, and respect for women. The Unity Movement. The Big Tent. All Americans are welcome and valued in this new golden age about to emerge. All Americans’ rights are to be respected.

Freedom of conscience.

Religious freedom.

Freedom to worship.

President Trump especially needs to give a speech that addresses those voters who feared him most, and who fear and hate him now. He needs to speak compassionately and empathically to them and to their families, saying that he intends to be a President for all Americans, whether they voted for him or not, and whether they agree with him or not.

He must say that he intends to raise the incomes and boost the safety of the families of all Americans, whether they fear and hate him right now or not, whether they voted for him or not.

He must say that he intends to protect the Constitutional rights and liberties of all Americans, whether they fear and hate him now or not, whether they voted for him etc. (Repetition is key to getting talking points to break through to voters and bypass media filters).

He and his team need to say openly and often that they intend to love and welcome and cherish all Americans, of whatever race, creed or color, whatever religion, whatever their families look like (yes please) and whatever their political beliefs. He needs to take back from the Left their buzzwords of “respect” “rights” and even “inclusion.” He needs to talk about “equality” so people forget the false appeal of the Communist term “equity.”

President Trump needs to reclaim for himself the Left’s attack terms. So he should pepper his speeches with restating his “empathy” for all Americans and his “compassion” for all Americans, agree with him or not, etc.

It has never been more important to lay to rest the cheap shots and the straw man caricatures of the opposition.

2/ Appointments have to be accompanied by PR releases and talking points and a round of interviews, and still photos and video clips. Tell the story.

The calls I am getting from liberal friends and family members center, as I warned they would, on abortion rights and on the environment.

President Trump and RFK Jr made an incredibly important appointment: sustainable farmer Joel Salatin, who is a darling of liberal media as well as a hero to many, in a USDA position.

Let us use this case as an example of what to quickly fix.

This appointment is huge, but when you google “Joel Salatin” without “Trump administration”, nothing comes up about this major news. Successful Presidential leadership is not just about achievements, as noted above, but also about telling America about the achievement and, even more importantly, about what it means. Without my liberal mom in Oregon (always my touchpoint for an informed, thoughtful liberal) being told by a Trump or RFK Jr speech about this appointment and farm policy, without a round of interviews with Salatin (on message, with talking points), and without a clear press release sent to media in advance of the interviews so that coverage stays on message, my mom is not going to know that this action represents a huge win for America’s environment.

Without any document — on the website, sent to reporters, presented by the transition’s or campaign’s press person (who is that?) explaining that this is not an isolated hire but part of a well-thought-out MAGA/MAHA environmental agenda, the hire comes and goes, and is lost to the media flooding that would rather cover protests against “white supremacy” in city streets, and videos of crying young women.

Now take that example and multiply it for every task the Trump team is undertaking. The teams need to message about a White House that supports racial and ethnic respect and unity. They need to message about respecting and boosting the lives of women — a slate of policies aimed at making women’s lives easier can do this: policies making sure parents can stay home with kids more easily; policies to showcase women entrepreneurs and small business owners and women in the military; speeches that showcase support for girls’ sports and that shine a light on teen girls’ achievements in science, tech and so on.

A set of events and policies aimed at young people needs to take place.

A set of events that welcomes rabbis, Jewish leaders, Imams, Muslim leaders, etc, to Mar a Lago, have to take place, even if these are brief photo ops. You get it.

All this positive messaging of a thematic agenda — rather than piecemeal announcements — will drown out the drumbeat of fears of a dead environment; a closed democracy; a racist regime; a Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale level of misogyny; as are all being forecast in a Trump presidency.

3/ Make it iconic

Tons of what the Trump transition should be doing is visual. The team he has assembled is extremely visually arresting, but he does not make enough use of aesthetics.

Take the Salatin example. Gold for visuals! The Trump transition should hold a press event and lunch (always feed the press, much as you hate them) at PolyFace Farm, Salatin’s exemplary farm, in Virginia. The press should meet the cows and goats. They should be offered the chance to feed them.

How is an image such as this not golden, for both a Trump administration, and for bored political editors and photo editors at legacy media news outlets?

Attack the day’s media wars pitting a version of Salatin with his adorable happy pigs — an image that implies a greener America and less cruel agricultural system — as opposed to images of angry insta-crowds in the streets of Philadelphia. Who will win? The pigs, of course.

But you have to get the image out in front first, in abundance, in order to beat back the opposition.

What does it mean to make a political image “iconic”, that critical skill?

What do you think of when you think of the Kennedy administration? Not just images of the President at a podium, giving his famous speeches such as his famous Inaugural Address that included the line, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

You think also of images of Robert Kennedy listening to the poorest and most marginalized of Americans, visiting them in their own communities, including the Mississippi Delta’s African-American communities and Pine Ridge’s Native American communities.

In these images, the Kennedy team are not dictating to or condescending to or making a DEI exemplum of the people whom they are visiting. They are clearly listening to them and speaking with them. Such images, more perhaps than their powerful speeches or inspired policies, led to the feelings of loving admiration shared by many Americans who had at first distrusted them.

These images gave the Kennedys a circle of political protection, a radius built up of political capital, that shielded them from efforts to derail their courageous policy initiatives. You cannot overestimate the power of iconic White House-driven imagery.

4/ Elevate and Align with Unifying American Culture, Fast

And they should make much more use of cultural and artistic figures as well, who are innately unifying. Appoint the beloved critic Dr Cornel West to a task force on getting humanities back into the schools and universities. Ask a great American novelist such as Annie Proulx to give a reading of a new work to the nation, and launch a project for the WH to host readings nationwide of classics of American literature. Invite a great American saxophonist or cellist to launch a series of travelling White House concerts and invite DC schoolchildren, and then send the program to schoolchildren nationwide. These initiatives cost little but after the culture wars of the last four to eight years they will feel like balm in Gilead to our tortured souls. They will change the subject from trans issues and sex ed, to bringing American high culture and literacy back to schools; and they will reassure citizens that the Trump team is a peaceful, civilized and cultivated one — thus making it harder for Trump’s enemies to whip up fears of crazed MAGA Visigoths arriving soon in your area with their clubs and AK 47s.

Here is President Kennedy and Mrs Kennedy welcoming and aligning with beloved American poet Robert Frost:

5/ Have A Range of Appearances in the Women around the Team

There is visual imagery that Trump and allies urgently need to send out vis a vis women. The following may seem trivial, but it is not.

All the women around President Trump are conventionally beautiful. I don’t mean to be rude or catty at all, but they also all seem to share a certain “look.”

It is a look of long waved hair or hair extensions, perfect makeup, false eyelashes and designer clothing.

I personally love it. But I don’t advise it. This style is actually offputting to the millions of women who most fear a Trump ascendancy.

Rightly or wrongly, leftwing and liberal women read that set of appearance choices as being submissive to the “male gaze”, expensive to manage, and inherently oppressive. I am not defending this view, just explaining it.

It would be wise for President Trump and his allies to showcase women in their circle such as Tulsi Gabbard and Nicole Shanahan, whose appearance is equally attractive, but who look a bit more relatable to non-Maga women. It would be valuable also to include and showcase images of Trump and team listening to women who look and “read” much more like the average mom and/or the average working or professional woman in America. This would go a long way to easing freaked-out women’s fears of gender submission under “the patriarchy.”

And task the talented women around both MAGA and MAHA with having bigger messages. Melania Trump, whose biography is a No 1 bestseller, turns out to be a powerful speaker with important messages to share. Cheryl Hines is a beloved actress with tremendous comedic range — and is a former or current liberal. Send her out to explain MAGA’s/MAHA’s exciting plans to boost the lives of women. Pres Trump’s granddaughter made a star appearance. Good move! Now send her out with a message of awesome plans and policies that show respect for the dreams and aspirations of young women. None of these women have to say the word “abortion”, though it does not hurt to remind everyone that Pres Trump does not favor a national abortion ban. They can simply flood the airwaves of the language of “respect” and “recognition” of women’s issues, challenges and achievements. The MAGA/MAHA team, lastly, should send these gifted emissaries to nontraditional nonpolitical media read by women of all backgrounds: Women’s Day, People Magazine, Good Housekeeping, even Star. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar will not, I wager, spurn the offer of an interview and photo session with Hines, Shanahan, or even Mrs Trump. And if they do, well, it does not hurt to try. There is a world of ways to bypass hostile political media, with positive messaging from the powerful, talented women around these principals.

RFK Sr did not have to issue a press release stating “I respect women”, to send the message with this powerful image of his wife and Coretta Scott King, that his administration respected women. The listening body language says it all.

That’s my unsolicited postcard/memo to MAGA and MAHA for today.

Bless you all, and please do get out ahead of that oncoming train.

And of course — God Bless America.