Donald Trump has apparently decided that one of the problems facing his administration is messaging.
His solution has been to send members of his Cabinet around the country to sell Americans on his agenda and convince voters that things are going great.
And on this particular initiative, I have only one piece of advice for the president: please keep doing it.
Because there is something genuinely useful about taking the people responsible for implementing Trump’s policies out of Washington, putting them in front of actual Americans, and asking them to explain how those policies are working.
Cabinet officials dispatched to promote Trump’s agenda have instead found themselves dealing with questions about everything from gas prices and beef imports to measles, while even some people on Trump’s own side aren’t necessarily satisfied with what they’re hearing.
Reality has a way of ruining the presentation.
I think there’s a larger lesson in that. Trump has spent a decade building a political movement that is extraordinarily good at creating its own reality. Inside that reality, every Trump policy is an unprecedented success. Every failure was caused by somebody else. Every piece of bad news is fake. Every statistic that helps Trump is definitive proof that he’s winning, while every statistic that hurts him can be dismissed as part of a conspiracy against him.
That works remarkably well when you’re speaking at a rally, posting on social media, or sitting for an interview with somebody whose job is essentially to tell you how right you are.
It becomes a lot harder when you send somebody into a community and a person standing five feet away asks a very simple question: What about me?
That’s the problem with governing. Eventually politics stops being a stump speech at some MAGA rally. People have to buy groceries. They fill their cars with gas. They try to find doctors. They send their kids to school. They own businesses and look at their bank accounts.
You can tell somebody the economy is fantastic until you’re blue in the face, but if their own experience tells them otherwise, you’ve got a problem that another bullshit press release isn’t going to solve.
And to be clear, I’m not giving Trump political advice here. I have absolutely no interest in helping this administration become better at selling its policies.
I want them to keep going.
Send everybody.
Put every Cabinet secretary in front of an audience and let Americans ask questions, because Trump’s entire political operation works best when he controls the terms of the conversation. He chooses the enemy, defines the crisis, tells you who’s responsible, and then announces that only he can fix it.
An actual constituent asking an actual question about why their lives have gone to shit under this administration really throws a wrench in their shitty Cabinet roadshow.
Suddenly somebody has to explain the policy rather than perform the politics. That’s especially revealing because Trump has built an administration around personal loyalty. These aren’t independent political actors who just happen to serve the same president; they are representatives of Trump and his agenda.
So when they go out into the country to sell that agenda, they’re doing something important whether they intend to or not: they’re stress-testing Trump’s claims against people’s lived experience.
Sometimes the claims don’t survive contact.
There’s another reason I think this matters. One of the most corrosive things Trump has done to American politics is convince millions of people that information itself is partisan. If a news organization reports something he doesn’t like, it’s biased. If a government employee says something inconvenient, they’re part of the deep state. If an expert contradicts him, the expert is corrupt.
That makes accountability incredibly difficult because there is always another layer of reality you can reject.
It’s much harder to tell somebody that their own life is fake news.
And this is why the way these stories get covered matters. One outlet can lead with the administration’s message about economic success while another leads with the questions Cabinet officials are getting from people who aren’t feeling that success at all.
You can read two stories about the exact same event and come away with two completely different impressions of what happened.
And that’s why I use ** Ground News**, because this publication doesn’t have corporate backers controlling what we can and can’t say. Reader support and partners who believe in independent media are what allow us to keep doing this.
And with an administration that spends so much time trying to convince people that any inconvenient reporting is somehow fake, Ground News has become one of the tools I use most.
Ground News is an app and website that lets you compare how different outlets are covering the same story across the political spectrum. You can compare headlines side by side, see political bias at the publication level, and spot when important stories or details are being minimized — or ignored completely — depending on who’s telling the story.
One feature I use a lot is the Blindspot Feed. It shows you stories that are getting heavy coverage on one side of the media landscape while the other side barely touches them. When an administration is trying to sell one version of reality while Americans are experiencing something very different, being able to see those competing narratives side by side is incredibly useful.
I’ve been on the receiving end of distorted coverage, so I don’t rely on any single outlet anymore. Ground News helps me see what I might be missing before I decide what I think.
If you want a better bullshit detector for everything happening right now, go to ** groundnews.com/fanone**.
A person doesn’t need a political science degree to know what they’re paying at the grocery store. They don’t need CNN or Fox News to tell them whether their business is struggling. They don’t need a Cabinet secretary to explain whether something in their community has gotten better or worse.
They know.
And politicians eventually have to confront that.
I’ve spent enough time around politics and media to know that everybody loves talking about messaging. What phrase should we use? Who should deliver it? Which demographic should we target? How do we get the message out?
But sometimes the message isn’t the problem. Sometimes people understand exactly what you’re doing and don’t like it, and no communications strategy can permanently solve that.
So by all means, keep sending Trump’s Cabinet across America. Let them leave Washington. Let them get away from the friendly interviews, the staged events, and the social-media ecosystem where every Trump announcement is treated like Moses coming down from the mountain.
Put them in front of the people who actually have to live with the consequences of the policies they’re selling, and let those people ask questions.
Trump wanted his Cabinet to go out and tell America how successful his administration has been.
Instead, America gets a chance to tell Trump’s Cabinet how it’s actually going.
And to that I say, let them fuckin’ hear it.
