"... the stark reality is that Trump didn’t deal with each of the situations as an effective communicator. To the contrary, he actually made each one worse than it otherwise would have been." And he always will!

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Trump Clearly Spinning Political Gold Into Lead
By Stan Collender, July 10, 2016

It took less than 24 hours for Donald Trump to prove that my last post was right: at least as a communicator he’s not ready for presidential campaign prime time.

My previous post was all about whether Trump would be able to respond appropriately to unplanned and unexpected events, that is, to the kinds of things a president has to deal with every day. I said I had serious doubts about his ability to do that. I assumed, however, that we wouldn’t know until after the GOP convention whether Trump would be able to take advantage of whatever happens to communicate in a way that would widen his appeal to a much broader audience.

I was wrong about the timing but not about Trump’s ability to communicate. Starting last Monday – the day after my post and about 2 weeks before the Republican convention even started – Trump showed that he’s a reverse alchemist: he took what should have been a golden week for his campaign and turned into pure political lead .

Consider the following.

On Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey’s press conference was a damaging blow for Hillary Clinton. Presumably this wasn’t a partisan attack on the likely Democratic presidential candidate; it was a condemnation from a very high-level law enforcement official. This was criticism from what communications professionals call a “third-party validator” and it’s usually quite effective.

What Trump should have done when this situation occurred was to go silent for several days, let Comey’s comments speak for themselves and dominate the news and allow the political situation to fester.

But Trump did the exact opposite. The same day the FBI director announced his agency’s findings, Trump made a controversial speech in North Carolina that praised Saddam Hussein. That immediately pulled focus away from Comey and Clinton and raised the question about his support for and approval of dictators.

Then Trump significantly increased the controversy over his retweet of a graphic that used a six-point star by making repeated statements that showed him to be overly defensive and oblivious to the controversy the original tweet created. The multiple explanations made by a variety of spokespeople demonstrated that neither Trump nor anyone else was in control of the situation.

Trump then ended the week with two mostly disastrous meetings on Capital Hill with House and Senate Republicans.

Given all of the previously reported concerns of GOP representatives and senators about Trump’s nomination and the steady drip of announcements about senior Republican officials’ decisions not to attend the convention, Trump needed to communicate that this was a kumbaya moment. He needed to show that the party was coming together at exactly the right time, that he saw Clinton and the Democrats as the real opponents and that he was going to help the GOP maintain its House and Senate majorities.

But Trump squandered the opportunity. Instead of reports about everyone holding hands and singing kumbaya, the leaks from the Republicans in the two meetings were almost all about Trump being combative, threatening and refusing to acknowledge that the concerns of those in the rooms might be legitimate.

How you feel about the substance of the Saddam Hussein, six-point star and Hill meetings issues is completely beside the point. As he also did with the Comey situation, the stark reality is that Trump didn’t deal with each of the situations as an effective communicator. To the contrary, he actually made each one worse than it otherwise would have been.

In doing this Trump demonstrated that he’s more than ready and certainly able to make what should be a positive situation into a big negative. He also showed a remarkable level of insensitivity that is almost impossible to ignore by all those who are not fierce Trump loyalists. He also raised questions about his willingness and ability to work with Congress (and vice versa) even if there are Republican majorities in both houses.

And he did all this – turning what should have been a truly golden week into political lead — in just one week.
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