Dan Pfeiffer (subscription) explains why MAGA’s usual childishness is actually quite savvy in this case:
One of the Super Pacs allied with Donald Trump released a video on Friday morning that took the Internet by storm. The ad uses the potentially apocryphal story of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis eating chocolate pudding with his fingers to attack his past support for cutting Social Security and Medicare.
Most Trump World shenanigans are stupid, bordering on self-destructive. That is not the case with this ad, which ran on CNN and Fox News on Friday morning. On the day after DeSantis signed a dangerous six-week abortion ban, it seems trite to care about the manner in which he consumes packaged desserts. While impulse control is a valuable attribute in a Commander-in-Chief who can unilaterally launch nuclear warheads, no one should really care that DeSantis was unwilling to wait for a spoon. Frankly, his pudding impatience may be the most relatable thing about the otherwise painfully awkward, malfunctioning Westworld robot authoritarian.
But bear with me; there is ample precedent to suggest the pudding thing could hurt DeSantis’s yet-to-launch presidential campaign. I don’t want to overstate the case. This is a long campaign and one ad or one anecdote won’t dramatically alter the trajectory. This ad isn’t even that great. Still, the pudding anecdote and how the Trump folks are weaponizing it is a case study of how presidential politics works in our broken media ecosystem.
People Don’t Vote for Weirdos
Thanks to all the coverage his cruel stunts have received, Ron DeSantis has remarkably high name ID for someone who has not even served as Governor for five years. But I theorize most Republican voters couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. All they know about DeSantis is that he is a mini-Trump and pisses off all the right people (Liberals). In other words, support for or interest in DeSantis is a mile wide and an inch deep.
DeSantis’s decision to delay launching his campaign left a vacuum that Trump intends to fill. Trump, who has an instinctual sense for the jugular, is trying to introduce DeSantis to the voters before the Florida Governor can do it himself. And the picture Trump wants to paint is of DeSantis as an establishment-friendly, awkward weirdo. Trump has an instinct for the jugular and knows Americans don’t like to vote for weirdos.
Once again, I doubt anyone cares how DeSantis consumes his pudding, but the anecdote in the ad is part of a larger project to make him seem totally unrelateable. Presidential elections are inherently different from any other contest. Because the U.S. President is both head of state and head of government, they are omnipresent in American life. In picking a candidate, voters sign up to have that person in their lives for at least four years. Relatability and likeability play a role in some voters’ choices. This is known as the “beer question:” with which candidate would you rather have a beer? I wish that weren’t the case, but it is.
In the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney had his own “pudding problem.” The Boston Globe reported that Romney had once gone on a long car ride with his dog Seamus strapped to the roof of his car. Needless to say, when voters learned about this anecdote, they were more than a little concerned about Romney’s judgment and empathy. Mostly, they just thought it was really, really weird. The story was fodder for comedians, the late night shows, and Internet jokes and memes. In the Obama campaign, we wanted as many voters to learn about Romney strapping the dog to the roof. At one point, we even engineered a photo op of President Obama taking his dog for a ride INSIDE the car, just so we could jokingly tell people about Romney’s dog.
Was this the most important issue? No. Was it a little juvenile? Definitely. Did it help us win? Maybe. It was one more data point in the larger argument that proved effective. People thought Mitt Romney was out-of-touch and could not understand their lives and concerns.
Hijacking the Freak Show
In 2006, Politico founder John Harris and disgraced Newsmax personality Mark Halperin wrote a book called The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 that purported to lay out a roadmap for how someone could win the upcoming 2008 election. Drawing on interviews with Bill Clinton, Karl Rove and others, Harris and Halperin speculated on how that election would play out. One problem: the words “Barack Obama” do not appear once in the book.
Oops.
As you can imagine, much of that book aged like milk in the hot sun but there was one useful component. The authors coined the phrase “The Freak Show” to describe the new Internet-first media environment embodied by Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and an array of newly powerful bloggers. A candidate’s ability to navigate “The Freak Show” without losing control of their public narrative was a necessary component for winning a presidential campaign. “The Freak Show” has only gotten exponentially freakier in the ensuing 17 years. The Internet, cable, and Twitter feast on weird personal foibles like a leading presidential contender eating pudding with his fingers. That’s the sort of content that leads to clicks and views. That’s the stuff that goes viral. And in our disaggregated media ecosystem, virality is often the only way to get a piece of content in front of a viewer.
However, going viral for the sake of virality is a bad strategy. Finding a way to piggyback a piece of persuadable information onto viral content is Holy Grail. Trump has hammered DeSantis for weeks over his past support for cutting Social Security and Medicare. There is little evidence in the polling that his attacks are reaching voters. Yet another ad about Social Security cuts would get scant attention. An ad about pudding and Social Security? That is destined to get the kind of clicks and coverage campaigns dream about. The more viral an ad goes, the more cost-effective it is.
The Pudding Ad is reminiscent of an ad George W. Bush’s campaign ran in 2004. In that campaign, John Kerry decided to go windsurfing — which was seen by some (for reasons that made no sense) as an elite and effete activity befitting of the Boston Brahmin caricature of the Senator. The Bush campaign tried to weaponize that imagery in a now somewhat infamous ad that used the footage.
Like the Trump ad, the Bush Campaign saw something funny and weird that would generate media and Internet attention and paired it with a persuasive message backed by their research.
Of course, this campaign will not be decided by an ad or one very amusing anecdote, but the entire situation is a window into what works in our very bizarre media environment.
I think this is right as depressing as that is. But I will never in a million years understand how anyone could not see that orange monster for the flaming freak that he is. The hair alone should have launched a thousand ads like this. He was relentlessly exposed as the monumental narcissist he is. I mean: “I am a very stable genius!” He suggested that people might be able to ingest disinfectant to cure COVID. He loves Kim Jong Uhn. Kim Jong Uhn!!!! And he made up out of whole cloth that he won an election he lost by 7 million votes and incited his followers to storm the US Capitol.
And it meant nothing to half the country.
I would love to know what Pfeiffer thinks accounts for the fact that the greatest weirdo the political world has ever produced managed to convince conservatives that a man who wears more makeup and hairspray than Ru Paul is their avatar. How did that happen???