A Withering Operation?

With Hillary Clinton’s campaign now relying heavily on help from heavy-weight surrogates by the likes of the Obamas and Joe Biden – doing their best to capitalize on the incumbent advantage -, it appears that Trump’s campaign is actually reeling in their surrogate outreach on a number of fronts, seemingly deploying Trump to lead his rallies with very little introduction. Due to the negative media attention recently arising from the GOP frontrunner’s surrogate’s appearances on a variety of news casts and talkshows, one might actually be inclined to believe that this is probably the best possible route his campaign can take at this point.

Trouble with Women Across the Board

Recently, former US Speaker of the House and avid Trump supporter/surrogate, Newt Gingrich, made headlines for getting into a now-viral argument with Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, claiming that she seemed “fascinated with sex” and didn’t “care about public policy.” In the wake of Gingrich’s statements, there has been a media storm decrying his statements, once again reinforcing the liberal media’s rhetoric on Trump’s campaign being very essentially anti-woman.

One-on-One Interview with Newt Gingrich (and that Megyn Kelly Interview)

Though Trump and his higher-up campaign managers have since come out in support of Gingrich, praising his criticism of Kelly and defending his statements, many viewed this latest misstep by a Trump surrogate as yet another straw to contribute to the continual breakage of the camel’s back – should one actually be cognizant that the camel exists, mind you. However, should one be completely unaware of the existance of said camel, one might be able to interpret Trump’s defense of his surrogates as simply extending one of his most commonly-used Challenger strategies, taking an offensive position on the issues, to function as his campaign’s greatest – and, perhaps, only – consistency: an effectively unyielding offensive take on life demonstrating that he is, in fact, the most capable enforcer of political stuffs and things that the American public has available at the moment.

The Delicate Task of Deligation

Due to the fact that Trump has thusfar foregone the typical delegation of harsh attacks on his opponent and all those in her camp to surrogates, another common Challenger strategy, it will be interesting to see how he utilizes his remaining surrogates in the days leading up to the election. Because of the fact that they’ve seemed to do more harm than good throughout the course of this brutal election cycle, it may actually be smart for Trump to reel in his surrogates and simply stay the course on his own.

All of this simply remains to be seen in the coming days.

 

One thought on “A Withering Operation?

  1. I think that you made a really good point about Trump’s surrogates slowly disappearing over time. I think that toward the beginning, the Trump campaign thought that utilizing surrogates would help get the media off of their back. That being said, I think it had the opposite effect; the media ended up being extremely critical and attacking the surrogates just as harshly as they had initially attacked Trump. I agree that seeing where the surrogate effort goes over the next few days will be interesting to witness. In my personal opinion, if I were them I would be very careful because the more people they have speaking on their behalf, the more likely they are to misstep; a misstep with an election that is this close could be absolutely devastating for their chances at winning this election.

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