Controlling the Conversation: The GOP Debate + Trump X Tucker Review
Post-2016 political logic has been who is talked about the next day is who wins. But does this still hold up?
On Wednesday evening, a day when Rudy Giuliani was booked in Fulton County, when Yevgeny Prigozhin of the Wagner mercenary group was shot down in a plane over Russia, and when Mercury staged retrograde, all GOP presidential primary candidates took a microphone to address the nation. Eight did this on Fox News in a live televised debate. President Donald Trump did this on X, formerly known as Twitter, via a prerecorded interview with Tucker Carlson, formerly a Fox News host.
Who won? If we are following the rules of attention in a Post-2016 political world where attention is the ultimate currency, the answer probably lies in whoever you are talking about most today. It is clear that Trump and Ramaswamy are winning that battle.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s strategy has been copying Trump: lobbing combative and controversial Tweetable one-liners on television that will pierce social media the next day, dominating the conversation. Trump’s strategy has always been to take controversial actions that will generate conversation about him — like not going to the debate but doing his own show — while physically standing apart from the other candidates.
Policy discussions — if anyone even cares about those anymore — are not what debates are about. They are about generating chatter about a candidate the next day. This piece is a retrospective on the tactics used to control that conversation.
“Television is declining?”
One of the first questions ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked Trump was whether or not he thought television was declining. The ex-president didn’t skip a beat: “I think cable is down because it lost credibility.”
I didn’t disagree. The cable debate looked less credible, less authentic if only because it looked so highly produced —so much mismatched foundation, cut-ins, and bad dye-jobs. Playing the debate side-by-side to the pre-recorded Tucker interview, all the candidates looked terribly fake with too much makeup on unforgiving high-def television. Trump looked relaxed and personable in front of Tucker. Filters and post-recording edits do wonders for the face instead of relying on hasty Botox and Ozempic for live television. Moving on from aesthetics…
Trump can control the conversation by not taking part in it, generating juicy and intriguing scenarios for other people to talk about on platforms that they actually spend more time on: social media.
By the numbers at first glance, it may seem like Trump won the night. As of 1:04AM EST on August 24, the Trump X Tucker interview had 94.7M views. While numbers on the Fox debate haven’t been released yet, the 2016 final debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had 71.6M viewers. Does this mean Trump is significantly more popular because of his “ratings?”
X’s (Twitter’s) metrics are misleading. The view count is derived from a person seeing it in their timeline—not if they spent any time actually watching it. A single user could be counted twice if they encounter it more than once in their timeline. 94.7M people could have seen the Trump interview for a few seconds or all 46 minutes.
All that said, television viewership generally is declining. In 2016, 70% of households that had a television also had cable or satellite services. These days, that number is down to 40%.
Most people will not watch Trump X Tucker in full. They probably scrolled past it, heard about it on other social media, or read that he forwent the debate in favor of a pre-recorded media event. Trump is more talked about for his choice of medium and choice to not debate than for what he even said during that rather… dull interview.
Boring Content Can Still Make for Hot Goss
For the 46 minutes I watched the Trump X Tucker interview, I couldn’t help but complain to myself how boring it was. I’ve been a Trump-tracker for a while and one thing Trump hasn’t been is boring — I have been a very engaged researcher! Yet this interview was painful to sit through and focus on. There was no dynamism. It did not appeal to ADD. It should’ve been a podcast I put on while folding laundry or chopping vegetables, half paying attention.
He went on and on about the following topics, which don’t have widespread appeal:
If Epstein was murdered. (Trump thinks not because “he was a Palm Beach guy” who had “beautiful homes, beautiful everything” and that would warrant suicide when you end up in jail. But, as Trump said to Tucker, “There are many people, I think you’re one of them, who think he was killed”)
How “we lost 35,000” to mosquitos when building the Panama Canal (which he insists is controlled by China now).
Something about how China pays the University of Pennsylvania and Penn pays Biden $999,999 so it isn’t $1M. (God bless the Penn comms team today, though this has been from a fairly niche talking point coming from a House Oversight committee investigation.)
How he retired “crooked Hillary” so he could say “crooked Joe.”
How water restrictors make for bad water pressure when “washing your beautiful hair.”
How Chris Wallace is a “bitchy little man” or a “fussy little man” (well, that was Tucker saying that).
How they had 58,000 people at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
That whoever thinks publicizing Biden on the beach is a good idea is wrong because Biden looks terrible on the beach and he can’t lift beach chairs that are meant to be light.
To be frank, so much of this conversation was inside baseball. So many of the talking points were references (like the Panama Canal) to larger conversations happening in niche ecosystems of conservative alternative media. These little asides about how Chris Wallace is a bitch or how water restrictors don’t lead to good hair are cute when live on a cable broadcast, couched in content with wider appeal, but isolated from that they just seem like incoherent rambling.
The interview didn’t have the core ingredients that makes Trump entertaining or lovable:
A debate partner, enemy, or a foil
A fast paced conversation
An audience
Zany 1-liners attacking someone in the news that day (this was pre-recorded).
Podcast-style sit-downs like this with (now niche) personalities like Tucker are not actually Trump’s best performances.
However, you probably won’t hear the substance of the 46 minutes. And Trump must be thanking God for this. You’ll just hear that Trump wasn’t at the debate and instead did a sitdown with Tucker Carlson on Elon Musk’s X. The conversation about Trump’s choice is more powerful than the substance of his own content.
I see this a lot nowadays. Tons of podcasts are out there. I know very few people who listen to even their favorites closely, but they certainly talk about “such and such went on such and such’s show.” The gossip about the show is almost more important than the show itself. The one liners that make it to social media are more important than the quality of the whole show.
And this is a tactic taught by Trump and learned by Vivek Ramaswamy.
Conflict is Attention and Attention is Influence
Vivek Ramaswamy is Trump’s student. He is an entrepreneurial outsider who lobs insults at his “establishment” opponents with zingy one-liners. He throws red meat to progressives by shouting “CLIMATE CHANGE IS A HOAX” or sparring with Nikki Haley that she will join the board of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin for supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia. His strategy is outlined by influencer Mike Cernovich’s maxim, “Conflict is attention and attention is influence.” Cernovich got big around 2016 thanks to his own Twitter battles with anti-Trumpers and progressive reactionaries. Ramaswamy is taking a 2016 playbook and trying to use it in 2024. He is generating conflict.
That said, his playbook feels so obvious now.
When Chris Christie said he sounded like ChatGPT, it was probably from plagiarizing Obama (Ramaswamy copied Obama’s initial debate introduction about being a “skinny guy with a funny last name.”) Ramaswamy is not only borrowing from Trump, but also taking lessons from Obama on how to appeal to populist impulses as a millionaire Ivy League educated lawyer with non-white skin.
Ramaswamy’s tactics — even probably knowingly plagiarizing Obama — are designed to get people talking about him on social media the next day. The grandiose statements. The fights with Pence or Haley. The sparring with Chris Christie. He did not say much substantively about what he wants to do other than what he believes in — and that is smart. Debates are no longer about sharing policy plans or issues-based positions — if debates were ever about that. He is using this to gain attention.
While Mike Pence talked about Reagan for the 20th time (if you were taking shots on Reagan, you have a hang-over today), Doug Burgum fixated on China, and Ron DeSantis talked about “woke” ad nauseam, Ramaswamy was sparring like Mike Tyson with everyone he could in his first ever televised debate. He accused everyone of being an establishment, neocon, super PAC shil (despite shouting “DRILL FRACK BURN COAL” as if Exxon or Shell paid him) and that he was the only youngin’ to speak truth to the geriatrics on stage.
When the debate was over, a Fox Nation commentator said about Ramaswamy, “It’s great to say all the things we think and feel but how are you gonna get it done?”
Will America keep buying the formula that whoever is getting the most attention is the best person for being a president?
America has had its fair share of outsiders as president in the past 16 years. Depending on the day and who you ask, some people revel in saying that the worst presidents in history were either Obama or Trump — both outsiders in some way when they got into office. Obama and Trump were some of the most ingenious attention-getters in recent history. Biden, of course, is something of the opposite. He is avoiding attention, avoiding television, avoiding platforms.
So, will attention win elections again? Or something else?