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Democrats 2020
"The Argument Needs to Be Elevated to the Dean Baquets and the Jeff Zuckers": Under Heavy Fire from Trump's Untruths, Biden Works the Media Hard
Calling for a Rudy Giuliani ban was only step one. Learning lessons from Hillary Clinton, Biden's campaign is taking the fight against Trumpian untruth to the top.
No one, in Rudy Giuliani's 75 years on earth, has been able to shut him up. Yes, Joe Biden's presidential campaign would have been thrilled if the major news networks had agreed to its "demand," delivered in a sternly worded letter this past Sunday, that CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, and NBC stop interviewing President Donald Trump's personal lawyer and all-purpose attack dog. But Biden's campaign didn't really expect that to happen—and the ban-Rudy letter was merely part of a larger game. A Biden campaign official says they have been quietly making a concerted effort of reaching out to key media bosses ever since Trump and Giuliani began smearing Joe and Hunter Biden over their involvement in Ukraine. "The letter was one piece of a broader, aggressive strategy that we have employed since this broke," the Biden campaign official says. "We have had conversations with senior leadership at networks and newspapers."
The Biden camp appears to have learned a lesson from Hillary Clinton's media troubles in 2016. Back then, the Democratic presidential nominee and her camp played "whack-a-mole," a senior campaign adviser says. When negative or misleading stories would appear, Clinton's camp would protest to frontline reporters. The coverage of a trove of emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee and campaign chairman John Podesta were the most conspicuous and painful example: Clinton's team argued, loudly, that headlines and stories needed to label the emails stolen or hacked instead of calling them "leaked," which was benign and inaccurate and damaging to Clinton.
Those pleas made little impact, partly because of the journalistic bias, exploited by WikiLeaks, toward "inside" information and conflict, and partly because of the long, antagonistic history between the Clintons and the press. And in the fall of 2016 the mainstream media still couldn't really comprehend collusion between Trump and Russia, or Trump's bottomless willingness to distort facts. A sign of progress is that last weekend Jake Tapper and Scott Pelley challenged and corrected Trump surrogates during interviews about the Ukraine scandal—something they very likely would have done anyway, without the Biden campaign's Giuliani warning shot. "It is still a problem and an issue for the media to grapple with," says Kate Bedingfield, the deputy campaign manager and communications director for Biden. "They have a significant responsibility to not present everything out of Trump's mouth as a statement of fact and to not chase him down every rabbit hole that he wants them to go down."
To change the climate, not simply the weather, Biden's team is aiming higher. "They were right to push back aggressively on booking Rudy," the former Clinton adviser says. "But we learned you're not going to win that way. The argument needs to be elevated to the Dean Baquets and the Marty Barons and the Phil Griffins and the Jeff Zuckers of the world." The leaders of the New York Times and the Washington Post and MSNBC and CNN would be rightly skeptical of any case made by Biden's team, and some of it would indeed be self-interested spin. But now, after three years of experience with Trump's lies, there should be a better chance of getting a hearing. "You say, 'Guys, here are clips of how you've covered this, and here is why this is a disservice not just to your readers, but to democracy. You have to be very careful this time, because what Trump is doing is using the media—again—to introduce bullshit claims that he just keeps repeating without any basis in fact.'"
"I'm not going to give specifics on meetings or calls," the Biden campaign official says. "But yes, we have spoken directly with some of the people that you just named." The stakes are high: If Trump is able to paint Biden as Hillary 2.0—an older, insider Democratic candidate dogged by vague corruption charges—it could shred Biden's greatest Democratic primary strength, his claim to "electability." So far the attacks don't seem to be working: Biden's fundraising remains strong, and a new Politico/Morning Consult poll today shows that 40% of likely Democratic voters believe Biden has the best shot at defeating Trump, a gain of one point from the previous poll.
Trump and Giuliani will probably continue to use a verb, "Biden," and "corruption" in every sentence. Yet to the extent that any coherent strategy exists on the president's side, a new element has crept into the impeachment counteroffensive. On Monday a Giuliani tweet asked whether President Barack Obama knew anything about Biden's 2014 efforts in muscling out an ineffective Ukrainian prosecutor. That same night Giuliani went on Sean Hannity's show and claimed Obama was involved in a conspiracy to dig dirt on Trump in Ukraine. If this were merely thickening the fog it would be fairly innocuous. But injecting Obama into the mix may also serve as a reminder to Trump's base that we used to have a black president, maybe one who wasn't even born in the United States. Biden has attempted to use Obama as a shield during his campaign; Trump would love to turn Obama into a sword against the Democratic front-runner.
The Obama alumni association, including the Pod Save America crew and David Axelrod, the former White House political strategist, have been very visible and vocal lately. The former president, though, has consistently and savvily kept his distance from the 2020 Democratic primaries and from nearly everything Trump. He is highly unlikely to take Giuliani's bait. "The president feels very strongly about letting the primary play out and letting the candidates make their own cases to voters, without him putting his thumb on the scale," a source close to Obama says. "That will continue until there is a clear-cut nominee. Then he'll be out and campaigning for that person in the general election next fall." Whether Trump is the Republican opponent, however, suddenly seems an open question.
— Impeachment fervor is causing a ruckus at Fox News
— Why Rudy Giuliani's Ukrainian adventure could end his career
— Inside the stunning collapse of WeWork (and its kooky CEO)
— It's official: Trump has met his Twitter match
— A surprise appearance by Tiffany Trump
— From the Archive: The power broker who taught Donald Trump the dark political arts
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Chris Smith is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He is the best-selling author of The Daily Show (the Book) and Till the End (with CC Sabathia). Smith joined VF after covering politics, entertainment, sports, and crime for New York magazine. Follow him on Twitter.
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