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I’ve heard from people concerned that we’re spending too much time talking about the Khans. I disagree, and here’s why.
As you’ll recall, Khizr Khan and his wife Ghazala spoke at the Democatic Convention to pay homage to their son, U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who died at the age of 27, during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004. During the speech, Mr. Khan, who is Muslim, criticized Donald Trump’s hateful comments about Muslims, and suggested that Trump had never read the US Constitution.
Khizr Khan, with his wife Ghazala, talk at the 2016 Democratic Convention about their son U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who died in 2004 in a car bomb in Iraq at the age of 28.
Some of our readers felt that by continuing to report this story, we were giving hate too powerful a megaphone, and further energizing Trump’s intolerant base.
Others worry that we’re getting off-topic; that the controversy is preventing us from discussing other more important reasons Donald Trump shouldn’t be president, such as the Supreme Court.
You don’t always get what you want
I’ve spent much of my career as a crisis communications specialist — usually on the side of creating crises, whether for politicians or business. And one thing I’ve learned over the years is that you don’t always get to pick and choose which issue is going to work against your opponent.
I’ve had a large number of issues I’ve worked on go viral over the years. And many were campaigns I’d chosen to work on before they went viral — meaning, for example, I had first decided to push President Obama on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and marriage equality, and only later did I find the right levers to push to help the story go viral, and ultimately pressure the President.
Finding those levers, those pressure points, those perfect stories to engage the media, enrage the grassroots, and psych out your target, was a day-by-day process, rather than something we had plotted months, or even weeks, in advance.
It’s a common problem with online advocacy. It can be difficult to get someone to finance your work, when you can’t 100% spell out the details of the project beforehand. I, for example, am looking for funding to take on Donald Trump over the next three months. But it’s difficult to explain in advance exactly what issues I would hit Trump on, and in what manner I’d hit him. For example, would I solely pen cutting blog posts to help shape the media narrative (and what would I write about?), or would my campaign also include publishing a parody of the Trump White House Web site (and I do mean white), with a Russian-language version (that accepts donations in rubles) and a swimsuit competition for the next Supreme Court justice?
It’s difficult to know in advance what I’d write about, or what parody sites I might create, because no one can predict which issue is going to hit the public and the media just right in order to go super-viral.
For example, no one could have predicted that the Russians, and then the Khans, would have been the two big issues of the past month, or that the Khans (Muslim-Americans, no less) appear to have caused Trump the most damage yet of this campaign cycle. And while a good advocacy campaign can attempt to make particular issues go viral, often times a good advocate jumps on an unanticipated issue just as it’s cresting and learns to ride, and feed, the viral wave.
That is to say, you can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.
(This is also why it’s important to try a lot of different approaches, and jump on a lot of different issues, to see which will ultimately draw political blood — then you really pounce on that one fertile issue.)
And this leads us into another response to those who feel these scandals are all silly-season. Even the silliest of scandals can bring a bully down. Now, I happen to think the Khan issue isn’t silly by any means. Trump’s mistreatment of this family goes to the core of who he is as a human being generally, and an American in particular. But even if it didn’t, it’s causing him political pain, and that is electoral gold.
But one critic suggested that 35% of Republicans will support Trump no matter what he says or does, so these kind of embarrassing issues don’t help us — or at least, they don’t truly hurt Trump. In fact, I think they do hurt him, and help us.
1. Trump energizes the Democratic base.
The recent, and incessant, outbursts from Donald Trump have now solidified Hillary’s support among Democrats more than they’ve shored up Trump’s base.
There this from Gallup:
Along party lines, 81 percent of Democrats and those who lean Democratic — and 8 percent of Republicans and GOP leaners — said they were more likely to back Clinton after the Democratic convention. But only 73 percent of Republicans and leaners — and just 2 percent of Democrats — are more likely to vote for Trump coming out of the Republican convention.
A more energized base gives more money (see below), volunteers, and more generally talks the candidate up, which helps influence others. They also vote, which is no small matter in a country where half the population doesn’t.
2. Good GOPers, Indies and Berners are more likely to support Hillary.
Related to point 1 above, in addition to energizing the pre-existing base, Trump’s growing list of outrages also tends to push more Bernie voters, independents, and reasonable-Republicans further away from Trump, and closer to Hillary.
And even if many anti-Trump Republicans, like Ana Navaro, say they will never vote for Hillary either, they’re still traditionally-Republican votes that Trump has now lost. And they’re publicly expressing concerns about Trump, which only helps reinforce his negatives to I voters. All of this hurts Trump’s chances in November.
3. This can lead to more donations for Hillary, and fewer for Trump.
The more emphatically Democrats, and others, support Hillary, the more money comes rolling in. And the opposite is true for Trump — the more scandal, the more denouncements from traditional Republicans, the fewer Trump’s donations, especially from traditionally-large Republican donors, like the Koch brothers, who Trump recently snubbed.
4. Stealing the news cycle.
Every time Trump messes up, he steals his own news cycle away from what he’d planned. We spent the first two days of the Republican convention talking about Melania Trump’s plagiarism, rather than whatever issues Trump had devoted those first two days to (what were they anyway, Benghazi and something?) That’s a loss for Trump, and a gain for Hillary. There are fewer than 100 days between now and the election, so every day’s news cycle matters, increasingly so as the election nears. And rather than spending each day talking about some viciously-effective new attack Trump has made against Hillary, we’re spending it debating how much Trump hates the troops. Talk about dispiriting Republicans!
5. Psychological warfare.
There’s also a psychological element to all of this. To win this election, Trump and his staff (and his followers) need to believe that they can win. And the more Hillary supporters take advantage of these scandals, the more the media talks about these scandals, and the more Trump himself responds to these scandals in the most abysmal way possible, the more people around him are going to become pessimistic about his chances. To paraphrase something I heard on TV a while back: The man who thinks he’s going to lose usually finds a way to make it happen.
What matters is winning
The thing is, short of doing anything illegal, immoral or unethical, I don’t really care how I win, so long as I win. I don’t care if the way we beat Trump is by discussing the Khans rather than talking about the importance of the next few Supreme Court vacancies. What matters to me is winning; what matters to me is defeating Donald Trump. No issue is too silly or too off-topic if it works.
Every choice an advocate makes should be judged by whether or not it helps achieve your objective.
Period.
Full stop.
Now who wants to help me take on Trump over the next three months?
Follow me on Twitter: @aravosis
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