The Scene
The instant CNN’s first joint interview with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz wrapped, and hours before it aired, the Trump campaign started spinning.“Hearing that CNN will NOT be releasing the full transcript of all 18 minutes (total) of the interview,” wrote Trump strategist Jason Miller on X. “She got jammed up,” wrote spokesman Stephen Cheung,” suggesting that a Harris meltdown might have been cut by the network.
But at 9 p.m. eastern, CNN aired its hour-long interview package; at 10:21 p.m., it published the transcript. Harris and Walz gave their first answers on abandoning a fracking ban (Biden-Harris policies had met climate goals “without banning fracking”), on a 2019-era proposal to decriminalize border-crossing (“I would enforce our laws as president going forward”), and Walz falsely saying he’d carried weapons “in” war (“my grammar’s not always correct”).
The Democrats had broken the seal on candidate interviews, ending a cautious 39-day period when Harris took the nomination, picked her running mate, and only took questions from the traveling press corps and social media influencers. The Trump campaign would not let up, comparing his readiness to take questions with her carefulness to make a bigger ad hominem argument: That the Democratic nominee is stupid.
Other campaigns have worked the media refs before. Sixteen years ago, Republicans goaded Barack Obama into scaling down his mega-rallies by portraying him as a teleprompter-bound “celebrity.” In both of his prior campaigns, Trump played the media against his Democratic opponent, shaming Hillary Clinton for taking no questions for weeks and accusing Joe Biden of running a “basement campaign.”
This year, the Trump campaign has turned access into a major campaign theme, a test of which ticket can actually handle the high-stakes randomness of the presidency.
JD Vance has taken a traditional flood-the-zone approach, taking questions every day to drive the campaign’s message, and portraying both sides of the Democratic ticket as lightweights. And Trump has mixed traditional quick interviews with the press with long and friendly talks to the new media — conservative and non-ideological podcasts and influencers — who don’t want to make news asking about hot-burning topics.
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David’s view
Every four years, the traditional media matters a little less — especially to Republican voters. This is why Trump paid no price for skipping every GOP primary debate. He dodged questions about his policy shifts since 2020, avoided confrontations with members of his administration who now considered him unfit for office, and won by a landslide.
Instead, Trump took questions from reporters when it made sense for him, and gave access to the new media that either didn’t exist or didn’t have broad reach when he ran in 2016. “Donald Trump might be the last president to be elected with a majority of CNN hits,” CPAC president Matt Schlapp told me in 2022, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was winning an easy re-election while freezing out the “legacy media.” Vance now spars with CNN and major networks every week; Trump sometimes gives major networks short interviews before his events, and question time at press conferences.
When Trump does talk to traditional reporters who can ask a pointed policy question, it often elicits news. His campaign had to clarify he hadn’t taken a position on Florida’s abortion ban yesterday after he walked right up to the edge with NBC News. In an interview with CBS News earlier this month, he suggested he wouldn’t enforce the Comstock Act to restrict abortion .
Overall, though, Trump talks far more with friendly podcasters and influencers, contrasting his ability to work in these settings with Harris’s light media schedule. On X, Trump’s campaign listed the greatest recent hits: “No holds barred, hour-long podcasts with Theo Von, Shawn Ryan, Dr. Phil, and Lex Fridman.”
Those interviews have helped Trump, as well as the interviewers, whose subscription numbers jumped after their unexpected access to a former president. (The interview with Fridman, a research scientist who’s taped polite conversations with multiple Trump endorsers and family members, hasn’t happened yet.) They’ve showcased a Trump advantage that’s helped in every race — he can talk confidently (if not accurately) about anything, and never worries about saying the wrong thing. The casual podcast format is also more accommodating to the kinds of digressions that get labeled as “rambling” in his speeches.
This month’s interview with Phil McGraw started with questions about the failed assassination attempt on him in Pennsylvania: “You had to have asked yourself: How am I here, and why am I here? How do you answer that question?” The interview with Ryan, a former Navy SEAL focused on veterans’ issues, was about other media treating Trump unfairly: “There’s been multiple times where the media’s misconstrued things that you say about veterans.”
On points, or on specific issues, Trump’s answers can be messy. One Ryan question about the withdrawal from Afghanistan veered into frustration that the mainstream media didn’t properly cover the House impeachment committee’s report on the Biden family. One McGraw question about what Trump thought of Harris “as a person” elicited a three and a half minutes on other topics, like the environmental effects of windmills. An exchange with Von about the power of lobbyists found Trump re-endorsing a policy (“if you’re an elected official or if you work in government, you can never be a lobbyist”) that he ended before leaving the White House.
These conversations haven’t probed Trump’s policies much, but they’ve been revealing about what information sticks with him. In long formats, he’s ruminated about how unfair it was for Biden to end his campaign and be replaced by Harris. “They had a list of ten people, and they put her on the list, and she came in 11th,” he told McGraw, who did not clarify which list Trump was talking about.
Several times, Trump has suggested that “Barack Hussein Obama” told Biden that “they” were about to invoke the 25th Amendment. That’s an explosive claim from investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that’s been widely discussed on podcasts, but ignored by media outlets that couldn’t confirm it with their own sources.
Could Harris mirror this media strategy, or hold her own if she did? Her end-runs around the traditional media have, so far, been short and funny TikToks, which don’t really touch on the work facing a president. There’s strong demand among supporters for viral content of her doing things like cracking an egg one-handed or giving cooking advice in old videos; taking the relatable person act to the influencer and podcast space could produce more of it.
Some allies are already urging the campaign to consider taking a page from Trump’s book and doing more nontraditional media. Former Obama aide Tommy Vietor said on Semafor’s “Mixed Signals” podcast this week that Walz would be a perfect fit for the kind of right-leaning sports shows Trump has visited, where he could counter a parody image of liberals among “Trump/RFK-curious dudes.” Every mention of future Harris interviews on social media inevitably generates supporters talking about “Hot Ones,” the popular YouTube interview show that runs A-listers through a gauntlet of scorching wing sauces.
Others suggest she follow Vance’s lead and do a blitz of traditional media as well: New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait suggested it would lower the stakes of each appearance. “Fear of interviews makes every interview far more important, thus raising the cost of giving a bad answer, thus making her more hesitant to do interviews,” he wrote.
For now, at least, she’s bought herself a little time to prepare for the September 10 debate and plan her next media moves in peace. Trump can continue to work the refs and point to his own media schedule, but arguments like “Joint ticket interviews don’t count” have a lot less pull than demanding a new nominee who took over in extraordinary circumstances submit to extended questions for the first time.
Notable
- In the Washington Examiner, Haisten Willis asks whether Trump’s new media outreach can attract young male voters. “The masculinity of Von’s appeal was apparent throughout.”
- In Mother Jones, Russ Choma contrasts the Trump interview with Theo Von with a Bernie Sanders interview conducted one week earlier, an “eye-opening lesson on influence in Washington” that stuck.