Trump and the limits of the tabloid candidacy

For Donald Trump, it was fun, and effective, while it lasted. For nearly a year, Trump deployed a strategy that worked well for him for three decades. Call it the Page Six strategy. Its tenets: snappy nicknames, controversy and volume.

Trump’s over-the-top persona was created in large part by New York’s tabloids (something I know about, if you browse my bio). It was based on headlines such as “Best Sex I Ever Had.” Trump could change his story day-to-day and make wild statements and the tabloids didn’t care, as long as he was never boring.

{mosads}That was the approach Trump brought to the GOP primaries, and it worked spectacularly! He labeled “Little Marco” and “Lyin Ted” and heckled Jeb Bush as low energy. Just like in New York, no matter what he did he never seemed to pay off price, as long as he was entertaining. Every day it was another shock claim, another insult and before his opponents could respond, boom, he’d moved on.

So giddy with his success, in January Trump boasted, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

But once the campaign shifted to the general election, Trump’s tabloid strategy backfired. The fight with the Khan family and now the remarks that gun owners might take care of Hillary Clinton put Trump on the defensive like never before. There are a few reasons for the change. First, the media is collectively taking the process more seriously, as it should.

Part of the reason was it was just time to, but you can’t help but wonder if they didn’t balk earlier because it was fun to watch the Republican primary devolve into a circus. Yes, I’m saying that most reporters are not Republicans (again, I speak from the experience of covering presidential elections).

And here’s the troubling part for Trump: there is no turning back. He can’t walk back from the persona he’s spent three decades crafting, even if he wanted to. After all, only he — after his wife Melania’s disastrous plagiarized convention speech — could proclaim, “all press is good press.” That’s the mantra of a publicist.

And it really showed when he picked on the Khan family, because it exposed the lie that is the Trump message: that he’s the voice of the “little guy.” Americans fed up with government cheered when Trump took on the establishment, but were shocked when he had the audacity to use the same tactics to demean Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of fallen U.S. Captain Humayun Khan.

But that’s the challenge with a tabloid strategy: it’s always about you, not your adversary. That Trump can’t distinguish that you treat the parents of a dead soldier different than Hillary Clinton reflects what he doesn’t get. Trump’s belief that all press is good demonstrates he doesn’t understand the difference between Page Six and politics. On Page Six, it only matters they you are being talked about. But in politics, it matters what they are saying about you. Unfavorable ratings don’t matter in tabloid — in fact they drive coverage. In politics, they alienate voters.

For better or worse (and it’s likely to only get worse), Trump is locked into the reality-show/shock approach. He’s now a prisoner to the strategy.

After an improbable run, Trump is being reminded what everyone in New York knows: You live by the tabloid, you die by the tabloid.

Tom Galvin was a political reporter for multiple publications, including the New York Daily News and New York Post.

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