As Donald Trump continues to flood each day with new executive orders and threats to various people and organizations, his former staffer and “The View” host Alyssa Farah Griffin has some advice for Democrats: update your “playbook.”
To kick off the day’s Hot Topics, the ABC hosts discussed former Trump White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon’s recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, in which he explained that Trump’s entire strategy is to “flood the zone” and overwhelm media to the point that they cannot pay attention to everything he does.
And, while Farah Griffin didn’t exactly approve of the idea, she argued that Trump’s strategy when it comes to using media to his advantage has been a key piece of why Democrats haven’t stopped him.
“He is working in a 21st century media environment that is outpacing the traditional media, but also the opposition,” she explained. “I think Dems are kind of playing on a 1990s playbook of like, ‘If I go speak on the Senate floor, or if I go on ‘Meet the Press,’ it’s going to stop him.’”
“And they’ve got to get quick and smart if they’re wanting to push back at how people are communicating now, because he knows how to overwhelm the system,” she finished.
Farah Griffin also noted that Trump’s most successful move has simply been inserting himself into situations to take credit.
“One of the things he is excellent at, and the media takes the bait often, is he writes himself into every story,” she said.”He didn’t just do the Super Bowl interview, he attended the Super Bowl.”
“When we had the astronauts stuck on the International Space Station, Elon Musk was already going to get them, but he took credit, ‘I’m going to get the astronauts back.’ When TikTok was down, to 167 million people, [there was a message saying] ‘Thank you, Donald Trump, that we’re back up.’”
Indeed, Trump continues to do just that. He was still a private citizen when TikTok went dark for less than 24 hours and then suddenly came back. He did not have the authority yet to actually do anything about it.
The president recently announced a pause on the tariffs he imposed on Canada and Mexico, due to “concessions” made by the leaders of both countries. But, those concessions were already happening, pre-tariffs.
You can watch the full discussion from “The View” in the video above.
