Trump’s Media Blitz: Talk Radio, a Video Game Celebrity and Elon Musk
Donald J. Trump’s media strategy can be summed up with a phrase often applied to one of his erstwhile nemeses, the logorrheic New York City mayor Ed Koch: unavoidable for comment.
The former president has certainly seemed that way in the month since President Biden yielded the Democratic ticket to Vice President Kamala Harris, upending a campaign that Mr. Trump was once convinced he would easily win.
Ms. Harris has dominated the national conversation even as she has mostly avoided reporters and declined to hold a news conference. Eager to reassert himself, Mr. Trump has embarked on a cavalcade of interviews in venues large and small, popping up on a video game celebrity’s streaming page, calling into a New York City drive-time radio show and holding court from his vacation homes in Florida and New Jersey. His appearances, however, often involve sympathetic interviewers who rarely challenge his words and intersperse questions with heaps of praise.
The results have been mixed. Fans enjoyed his appearances, and Mr. Trump’s news conferences were carried live on cable news. But he also set off controversies that his supporters have scrambled to clean up, such as when he told Elon Musk that some striking workers ought to be fired.
A sampling of Mr. Trump’s media-heavy month:
Date: July 30.
Interviewer: Sid Rosenberg, a longtime New York City radio personality who came to fame as a blunt-spoken commentator on Don Imus’s show (from which he was eventually fired for making offensive remarks).
Notable Trump quote: “If you’re Jewish, if you vote for a Democrat, you’re a fool, an absolute fool.”