Former president Donald Trump’s interview with Elon Musk on X last night generated millions of views and at its peak registered over 200,000 simultaneous viewers. While the opening was rough – either through overcapacity or a DDoS attack – the interview wasn’t terrible. Professional interviewers in the media aren’t at risk of losing their jobs to Musk, but in the interview, Trump came off as personable and more upbeat than he had been in a while.
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One thing that I heard more than anything else from people who lean left is that Trump “focused so much on the shooting,” which is an understandable thing for him to do. He came within millimeters of losing his life, and given some of his recent public performances (the RNC speech and his Mar-a-Lago press conference in particular), it’s clear it threw him off his game a bit.
But outside of that first 30 minutes or so – which also provided a lot more insight into Trump’s frame of mind regarding the shooting than we’d seen previously – Trump’s interview showed he can go for a long time without running out of things to say, and while Musk was anything but hostile, it’s not hard to imagine Trump couldn’t do the same in an interview with a more skeptical reporter.
The mainstream press, as expected, is not reacting well to the interview. The entire process circumvented their perceived role as gatekeepers of information from newsmakers to news consumers. They scoffed, fact-checked, and labeled the entire thing a mess.
But Trump can parlay this into a recurring theme while fixing the one problem the X Space interview truly had – it did not move the needle.
Based on the feedback and commentary last night, the people listening to the interview were either Trump supporters, Trump haters, or journalists. Pretty much everyone in those camps has already decided, and there is very little chance that those folks are capable of having their minds changed. The folks whose minds are most likely to be changed aren’t listening to X Spaces, and oftentimes they’re not even watching Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc.
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If Trump wants to win the most winnable voters, the ones he needs in the swing states that are still toss-ups, his best bet is to start doing interviews on local TV, local newspapers, and local radio* and appeal directly to swing state voters that way.
When your average American family is getting ready for the day, parents are reading the local paper or they are turning on the local talk show in the car on the way to take the kids to school or go to work. When families are settling in for the evening, they turn on their local evening news. While we talk all the time about ratings for the big 24-hour networks, the fact is that the legacy alphabet stations – ABC, CBS, NBC, etc. – attract millions of viewers not because of their own talent, but because they all have local affiliates with local programming that come on before the national news programming.
Trump and Vance can take advantage of this. Kamala Harris is running ads and getting favorable coverage from the press without doing any interviews. If Trump were to swing through the Rust Belt and do interview after interview with local outlets, he could reach voters in a way the ads and favorable national press coverage can’t.
Trump is largely absent from our local media. I’m a local media person** and I believe strongly that local media will always be a better format for talking directly to voters than anything the national press will be able to do for any politician.
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*Local talk radio still has a very impressive audience and is one of the most personal mediums out there. Most importantly, it is not just a right-wing audience. It has the amazing ability to attract people across the spectrum.
**I should also note that while I am not just promoting radio because I’m a radio guy (Louisiana isn’t a swing state so my station really wouldn’t apply to this column), I would be more than happy to accommodate the former president and let him speak directly to my audience.