Q&A
Donald Trump’s campaign for president has preferred podcasters to broadcasters and pushed presidential politics out toward a range of YouTube-centric voices well outside the familiar political media ecosystem, a strategy also adopted to a degree by Democrat Kamala Harris. In an interview, two of Trump’s senior communications advisors shared how they view the current media landscape. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
(One note: The conversation at times compares views on television, YouTube, and other digital platforms, but they aren’t comparable, and similar television numbers typically represent a larger number of viewers.)
Shelby Talcott: How do you see the media environment?
Brian Hughes: We are seeing an unprecedented bias in the Old Guard, traditional media, elite media. You look at things like the ABC debate, where one-sided fact checking, which essentially pits the president in a three-to-one matchup — granted, he still succeeded in that environment — but it’s just one indicator.
The good news for us is that there has been an emergence of an entirely new landscape and media. It’s gotten beyond a tipping point. We now see independent media folks that literally reach in the millions on social media platforms where you can have an unmediated pathway to people. So for all those reasons, this campaign has sought out ways to embrace it. We’ve actually excelled at it and created just a massive case study in how a political campaign nationally can get beyond the bias of the Old Guard to an entirely new place.
Alex Bruesewitz: I think the bias and the toxicity of the traditional press, the mainstream media, has pushed a lot of the viewers away and they’re finding their news now in some of these more fun, different paced podcasts. Lex Fridman, for example, he probably has the largest, maybe, besides Rogan, but Lex Fridman has arguably the largest independent center audience, both men and female.
Something that the mainstream media is getting wrong when we’re talking about our podcast approach is: We haven’t necessarily gone to these podcasts to just target young men. We are targeting people who have been disaffected by the mainstream media, independents who are relatively apolitical. These have provided a really unique medium and venue for us to get our message across. There’s a direct correlation between the bias and the toxicity of the mainstream media that’s disaffected the millions and millions of independent voters and viewers, and now they find their news in these alternative platforms.
Do you see any benefit at this point to going on these mainstream outlets, in terms of their viewership?
Bruesewitz: I mean, if you look at Rachel Maddow’s numbers – I don’t want to pick on Rachel, because she probably goes through a lot — but we have a podcast that came out at 9am this morning with Patrick Bet-David, and by two or three pm today that that podcast is going to have more views than Rachel Maddow would have in her prime time slot.
We’re also not totally ignoring mainstream press. President Trump just did a sitdown with Harris Faulkner. He’s still doing a lot of traditional press. Bloomberg [too], which was excellent for the president.
We’re not totally ignoring it, but we’re also taking President Trump’s message to places that politicians have never done before. The benefits to these long-form interviews is that they’re not getting spliced up or diced up, they’re not taken out of context, and people are being able to hear from President Trump in not necessarily just a totally softball interview. Andrew Schulz, for example, he asked tough questions, but he didn’t do so in such a toxic manner, and he actually allowed President Trump to explain his thought process on certain things.
We’re not looking to have 100% friendly interviews, and these aren’t 100% friendly venues, but the way that these questions are being asked in a podcast is much different than how they’re being asked by mainstream journalists.
Is there anything that’s sort of surprised you when it comes to your guys’ media strategy this time around?
Bruesewitz: I think what we’re doing better this time around than he’s ever done before is leveraging Trump as a person: The celebrity of Donald Trump, the unmatched aura of Donald Trump — that’s a very popular word on TikTok, by the way. He’s a star, and people love him, and being able to showcase him in new lights, in new ways, whether it’s through funny TikTok meetups with some of the biggest influencers in the world, or if it’s having an hour and a half long conversation with your favorite comedian — Theo Von or Andrew Schulz — or if it’s talking foreign policy with a Navy Seal with the second largest podcast in the country.
But it doesn’t matter where we take President Trump: If he has the opportunity to actually have a discussion that’s not totally contentious with an agenda, he knocks it out of the park.
We’ve had a ton of fun this go-around with the different media strategies — and Kamala is chasing us. Kamala had to totally change her media strategy because of how effective ours has been. And also, what’s very fun — go through the comment section of one of President Trump’s podcasts. You’ll see 95% of the comments are positive. Go through the comments section of Kamala’s most recent Charlamagne podcast: There’s 35,000 comments on it, and about 97.2% of them are negative.
Hughes: I also want to plant a seed, an anecdote, about the social media platform use: If you go way back, way back, we literally forced the media, not just in this country, but internationally, to acknowledge the diminished capacity of Joe Biden. It was our social media people that created the environment that they ended up calling “cheap fakes” by showing — by the way, unedited — pool feed videos of Biden completely out of it.
That helped finally start to break loose the narrative. Obviously, the debate performance was an exclamation mark that made it undeniable, but the realness of that dialog came from us bypassing the Old Guard media and presenting raw facts, raw video evidence, to people for consideration. And it started the dialog that, again, was really concluded by that debate, but began months earlier by our social media team.
And we were part of the amplification of what 60 Minutes did with their bogus edit of Kamala Harris that became driven by social media first. Mike Johnson having a similar experience, obviously, Johnson’s team pushed it together, but we’re helping direct people to that. So the idea is, it’s not just about bypassing the old media model, but it’s exposing them and our opponent to everything that otherwise might not be covered.
Bruesewitz: We would not be able to have this efficacy on social media in 2020.
Why?
Bruesewitz: Because of the censorship. There was kind of a war on free speech, if you will, in 2020. And they kind of lifted that on X, Mark Zuckerberg is no longer putting his thumb on the scale on Instagram or Facebook. TikTok is significantly larger today than it was in 2020 and despite very valid concerns about the platform, it’s been good for us this campaign cycle. So we actually are playing with a more even playing field, like we did in 2016.
I think President Trump used social media so effectively in 2016 and felt it propelled him to the White House. Then Elizabeth Warren got really upset, advocated for censorship, so 2020 was a little bit different. Now it’s kind of back to the 2016 days of social, and it allows people to share information freely. It’s not so one-sided.
How is social media shaping Trump’s image?
Bruesewitz: There’s a method to everything that we’re doing on media, and they know that’s working for us. That’s why I would argue they’re attacking us as a threat to democracy. While she’s saying that, Trump is talking about Wally Pipp and Lou Gehrig on Bussin’ With The Boys.
That narrative doesn’t really work when they see who Trump is as a person in these long form formats, laughing, joking — the fear-mongering narrative that the Democrats tried to create is totally wiped out when we get to showcase Trump in these long form interviews.
Do you guys see any benefit to him going on some of the podcasts Kamala has recently gone on, like Call Her Daddy?
Bruesewitz: Kamala Harris’s podcast with Call Her Daddy had 600,000 views on YouTube in five days. Our podcast with Andrew Schulz had four and a half million views in five days. They came out the same week. [As of Sunday afternoon, Harris’ Call Her Daddy interview had around 644,000 YouTube views and Trump’s Flagrant interview had around 5.3 million. In the latest Spotify podcast charts, Call Her Daddy, an audio-centric podcast, outperforms Flagrant, though specific numbers for the Harris and Trump interviews on that platform are not public.]
And again, I look at the comment section as kind of a poll, because a lot of these people are listening to the podcast. The Call Her Daddy podcast was almost 100% negative comments in the comment section, compared to the comment section of the Andrew Schulz podcast, about 100% positive, but 135,000 comments. Yeah, you can talk about the views, but hear what the people who are listening to the podcast had to say. They’re not pleased.
Joe Rogan?
Bruesewitz: I don’t know, you’ll have to find out!
Hughes: We’re not going to talk about the internal process of how we pick, we do that when we do that. But it’s very interesting that Kamala has leaked, not confirming or booking Rogan, but simply entering into discussions with Rogan about doing it. Will she do it? I don’t know, but the idea that they chose to leak out the conversation, I think says more about her strategy than actually doing it.
Trump is obviously a traditionally old-school guy, he loves cable news, he’s read the newspaper for years. Did it take much convincing to get him on these alternative platforms, and was he surprised to learn how much reach they have?
Hughes: You can attribute it directly to President Trump himself: He’s cited his family, including Barron, who’s obviously a young man who is very plugged in to modern culture, as being part of the influence of him taking it under consideration and then ultimately deciding to do it.
Bruesewitz: Barron is totally on top of these things, and also: The numbers. We like ratings, and I don’t want to keep harping on the comment section, but we get great reviews. You know [the theory], the more they hear from her [Kamala], the less they like her? The more they hear from Trump, the more they like him.
We feel that the comment sections are fantastic for us and the numbers are fantastic. [And] we move these guys way up, and we have fun doing so.
When this is all said and done, and you look back on it, do you think what you guys have done this campaign cycle is the new way forward for campaigns?
Bruesewitz: I think every cycle changes, and I think what you’re also proving through this process is, again: Look at the numbers. Trump moves mountains on these numbers, Kamala doesn’t, she’s a dud. Nobody cares about what Kamala has to say. Donald Trump is a once-in-a-generation political figure and personality, and so I don’t want to say this only works for Trump, but you don’t know what this looks like without Trump.
Hughes: The Old Guard is driving [people] away from the old model, and all of these things that are replacing it are exciting, building huge audiences, and speaking to things in a way that Americans are more comfortable with and more interested in hearing.
I believe, post this election, the result will demonstrate that the downward trajectory of the Old Guard and traditional media will only continue.
Bruesewitz: [Look at the] Gallup poll. Trust in the mainstream media has reached an all-time low. That’s not great for anybody, it’s not great for our country, but what’s unique right now is it’s kind of given opportunities for the podcasters and for alternative media platforms. There’s so many more forms of news now, and I think that’s a good thing for the country.