‘All Trump, All the Time’ — Inside the Trump campaign’s media strategy

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Donald Trump sitting down with podcast heavyweight Joe Rogan on Friday was that it hadn’t already happened. The former president has been on an expansive nontraditional media tour during the 2024 race, sitting down with a range of podcasters, but often those targeting young men in search of the Bro vote.

Helping chart the course is one of Trump’s most trusted advisers, Jason Miller, who laid out the campaign’s approach in an interview with the Playbook Deep Dive podcast.

Miller and Trump have a long history together. He’s worked on each of Trump’s campaigns since 2016, in roles ranging from comms guru to senior strategist, and he isn’t afraid to elaborate on the campaign’s strategy or defend Trump’s most controversial comments.

The dive into alternative media has been part of a bid to soften Trump’s image, and if the tight polls are to be believed, it’s working.

As for who gets credit for which podcasts the presidential candidate goes on, Miller, a longtime Trump loyalist, said it’s been a group effort on the campaign but gave a special shoutout to Trump’s 18-year-old son, Barron.

“Hats off to the young man,” Miller said. “Every single recommendation he’s had has turned out to be absolute ratings gold that’s broken the Internet.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity by Deep Dive Producer Kara Tabor and Senior Producer Alex Keeney. You can listen to the full Playbook Deep Dive podcast interview here:

Your campaign has spent the past few months leaning into these long-form podcasts that have almost nothing to do with politics. Trump’s been talking about sports, family, addiction issues — it’s a very different strategy than we’ve seen from most politicians.

Tell us a bit about pushing the regular traditional media aside and focusing on these podcasts?

I’ve got three separate answers within there. One, with regard to traditional media, I think The Wall Street Journal study that came out a week or so ago showed that President Trump has done either two times as many media interviews or two and a half times as many mainstream media interviews as Kamala Harris since she became the nominee for president. So we’re still doing a lot of the traditional media.

But when you look at the impact of podcasts, YouTube shows and nontraditional media — part of the thing is you’re reaching voters where they’re at. I mean, you have tens of millions of Americans here who, as much as I love it, are never going to click on Politico.com or turn on the CBS Evening News.

You have millions of Americans who get their news from social media, maybe they get it from podcasts. Also, to the decentralization of media, people are able to more closely lock in on topics and issue areas that appeal to them. And it’s not all the fun shows like former wrestlers or Barstool Sports-type shows. We also do things like Dave Ramsey, who’s the single best consumer finance podcaster in the business and Patrick Bet-David, who has the single best entrepreneur-based podcast of anyone in podcast media.

As someone who’s a veteran of both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, one of the differences is that we couldn’t have as many of the unscripted, freewheeling retail stops and things like that in 2020 that we could in 2016. And the reason is simply when you’re president of the United States, there’s no flexibility. There’s so much Secret Service.

There was also Covid, right?

You also had Covid. So we couldn’t do a lot of the things that President Trump had done. In many ways, it’s not as though this is a brand new thing for President Trump. It’s just something he did quite frequently in 2016, regarding retail stops and nontraditional media that he couldn’t do in 2020.

But also, this is the trend. This is why some of the biggest names in media are now doing podcasts and such, because that’s where so many voters are getting their information.

It also seems like there’s been an intention to humanize him in a way that perhaps people forgot: That he was a celebrity, an entertainer, a dad and a grandpa. What was the moment where you said, “OK, we really need to lean into this human side of Trump?”

We did it from the very first time that he was on the trail. I hadn’t even rejoined the campaign at this point in January of 2023. But we went to South Carolina and New Hampshire, to two stops in one day. And while in South Carolina, we took President Trump to, I believe it was Zesto’s in West Columbia, South Carolina — an ice cream and burger place.

As I was looking at the beginning of his campaign and saying, “What do we want to make sure we get back to that was in 2016 as opposed to 2020?” Number one was the unscripted moments. And so when we took the president there, it took off like wildfire. Of course, when we went to East Palestine a couple of weeks later, we went to the McDonald’s there. Those were great viral moments. And so literally from his very first trip as an announced candidate in this election cycle we started working in the retail and the unscripted stops.

Are there people on your campaign who regularly listen to these podcasts he’s been interviewed on? Are his sons involved?

Group effort. Barron has been very involved in recommending a number of the podcasts that we should do. I got to tell you, hats off to the young man. Every single recommendation he’s had has turned out to be absolute ratings gold that’s broken the Internet. He’s done a great job. I’ve certainly recommended some. We have other team members who recommended podcasts. But also sometimes it’s the other way around where maybe the president has a relationship with the person, say, like the Nelk Boys, or maybe it’s Tyrus, the Fox News co-host of The Gutfeld Show. So it kind of comes from both directions. But it’s really turned out to be something that I think has worked to our advantage.

At the start of Trump doing these podcasts, when he spoke to Adin Ross, he seemed like he was sort of just hosting a Trump rally on a podcast. But around the time he got to the Theo Von interview and the Andrew Schultz interview, he became much more dynamic and emotionally engaging. Was there some sort of coaching over time on this? Did something change in him?

A lot of times those are just a factor of either the relationship with the host or the format of the interview. President Trump is going to be President Trump when he sits down for an interview. Sometimes there are some interviewers who have really perfected the interview style. But it’s definitely something that we’re going to continue to do through Election Day, and I could see that after President Trump wins that he does going forward.

So nobody ever said to him, “You don’t have to think of this as a rally. Just go in and have a conversation?”

If you work for President Trump, you don’t say something like that. The president’s always going to have his own style. It’s fine if someone wants to recommend a point to bring up or something. But he has his own brand. He knows what he’s doing on this.

Somebody told me that you all were in the room for Theo Von’s podcast and when Trump started talking to him about doing cocaine and asked “What’s that like?” people started laughing pretty hard.

I think what people really are drawn to when they see the human side of President Trump, whether it’s his life experiences — when he talks about his brother and his brother’s challenges with addiction, obviously his brother died from complications brought on by very severe alcoholism — I thought the Bryson DeChambeau golf cart interview, I thought was absolute gold.

Why was that so effective?

Because it just showed that he’s someone who has fun. It’s that relatability factor, that he can be a normal person and have those conversations. When you’re able to communicate the relatability, then voters feel even more strongly that the policies that you’re pushing for are being done because you want to help them. It’s another way of helping to complement that message.

A lot of Republicans I’ve talked to during the campaign have said that they wish Trump would talk less. But you took the opposite strategy. He’s talking more and it seems to be working at least in this format.

And that was another thing that we decided right at the very beginning of this campaign. When we’re looking at what worked in ‘16, what worked in ‘20 and vice versa, not only do we want to get back to our 2016 roots as far as some of the rallies, but also the unscripted moments. But we wanted to make sure this is going to be all Trump, all the time. The reason being that the media is going to focus on Trump because Trump generates clicks.

He’s also a presidential candidate.

But literally, I’ve had countless editors and reporters tell me that, “if we can put ‘Trump’ in the title, then it’s going to get clicks and then my bosses will be happy.” So knowing that every single thing that he does, every single day, people are looking at how to get Trump into the headline, that we want to make sure that it’s headlines and it’s stories and issues that we want to be talking about how that helps his campaign as opposed to just allowing others do that for us.

How central do you think this strategy of using nontraditional media has been to Trump catching up to Harris in the polls?

I think it’s important. I think also President Trump really drilling down and focusing on the economy and on immigration has also been a big key. I also think that Kamala Harris has made a number of real strategic errors. I think her going to the border was a massive strategic error.

Why so?

Because it reminded everyone that she’s the one who wrecked the border. And also that day, those ICE numbers came out showing the number of murderers and criminals that were loose in the country. And the Harris campaign was inept at responding to those.

JD Vance also has been very helpful. His debate that he had with Tim Walz I thought went very well for us. But I think this Kamala Harris strategy of going out and doing a whole bunch of media has really backfired. I mean, who would have thought Sunny Hostin from The View really killed Kamala Harris’ candidacy? But you could make the case that Sunny did that.

You’re referring to the question of how she was different from Biden when she didn’t have an answer?

Yeah. I mean, not exactly a trick question.

Your campaign said she was too chicken to do a bunch of mainstream interviews for a long time. She has now put herself out there, including going on Fox News. Why doesn’t Trump do MSNBC or something of that nature?

The president’s been doing a lot of confrontational interviews. I mean, take a look at the interview with John Micklethwait, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg, just last week at the Chicago Economic Club. President Trump went and did the Univision town hall. And President Trump has also been doing press conferences all the time. These press conferences will go an hour, hour and a half. Kamala Harris has still yet to do a real press conference in her entire time as the Democratic nominee.

In terms of other get-out-the-vote efforts, I’ve heard from someone in the campaign that you personally are the one lining up rappers’ endorsements. Can you confirm that you’re friends with Waka Flocka Flame, Kodak Black and 50 Cent?

I wish. Sadly, now that I’m a little bit older, my rappers are still like Chuck D from Public Enemy and Ice Cube and some of the ones I’ve listened to in my formative years. There are other team members who are friends with them. But, no, I can’t take credit for any of that.

A lot of people have said this race is going to be basically 50/50. They don’t know who’s going to win. What would you say the odds are right now that Trump wins?

I think this is going to be very close coming down the homestretch. It’s a divided country. That being said, I would much rather be in our shoes than Kamala Harris’ for a couple of reasons. One, President Trump is at significantly better polling positioning right now than he was in 2020 or 2016. We see the early vote numbers that are on our side.

But all of that being said, I do not [put] anything by the Harris campaign or some folks in the media to pull any attempt at the proverbial October surprise or to try to censor or shut things down like we saw with Hunter’s laptop four years ago. So we’re treating this as though we’re behind by one point and fighting all the way through Election Day.

Speaking of October surprises, Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, obviously made some waves by accusing Trump on the record of denigrating wounded soldiers and praising Adolf Hitler. And he argued that Trump has “rejected what America is all about” and is basically the general definition of a fascist. What is your reaction to that?

Yeah, total bullshit. John Kelly’s a loser. People inside the room say that this did not happen. We have family members of the fallen soldier who’s being honored saying that this is B.S. We have a lawyer for the family saying this is B.S. So I’m going to trust the people who are in the room, not a bitter, fired former staffer who clearly has an ax to grind. And to come out in the final two weeks of a campaign, to go and launch a political attack like this, invoking the name of a fallen soldier and creating falsely some story about President Trump, I think is really pretty shameful.

You think a four-star Marine general made up this story to hurt Trump?

Yes.

Just because he was fired? Why would he do that?

Because he hates President Trump. He’s clearly triggered. If President Trump were a fraction of the negative-type person that General Kelly seems to describe him as, why didn’t he quit on the spot? Why didn’t he? Because it’s total bullshit. Everybody knows it’s bullshit. And if he were genuine and sincere, he would have quit on the spot, not waiting until he got fired.

Is there a concern that headlines like this — and Liz Cheney being out on the campaign trail with Kamala Harris right now — could change the trajectory of the race at the last minute? Make the national conversation end up right where Harris wants it to be about Trump’s fitness for office?

Not at all. In fact, I’m glad that they’re going down this path, especially with Liz Cheney. If you want to send Liz Cheney, daughter of the architect of the Iraq war, to Michigan, you know what? Where can I pitch in? In fact, next time, Liz, if you’re listening, I will buy you and Kamala Harris lunch. I would like nothing else than for Liz Cheney to spend every day between now and the election in Michigan campaigning. You want to talk about something that’s going to alienate Arab Americans and get people pissed off? And the other thing, too, is nobody likes Liz Cheney. Republicans don’t like her. Democrats don’t like her. The Cheney name is radioactive.

You don’t think that there’s a fraction of Republicans who are skeptical of Trump who do like her?

Not Liz Cheney. Obviously, no one’s going to get 100 percent of their party’s vote. I think President Trump is getting something like 96 percent of the Republican vote. Kamala Harris is getting a lower percentage of the Democrat vote. Nobody likes Liz Cheney. I don’t even think people with the last name of “Cheney” like Liz Cheney.

President Trump is running on how he’s going to improve everyone’s lives. President Trump is going to fix the economy to make your life better. President Trump is going to secure the border to make your life better. That’s a very clear and compelling closing message. If Kamala Harris’ closing message is, “Hey, here’s the daughter of the architect of the Iraq war,” that is not a good closing message.

Was there ever a point during the campaign cycle where you said, “Okay, because of the abortion issue, we know we’re going to have an issue with women. So let’s make sure we’re focused on turning out these men?” That certainly seems to be the way we’re all interpreting your strategy.

No. If you look at the public polling there’s a reason why even Kamala Harris has tried to dip her toe in the podcast world, because many of these independent men who do not follow politics everyday, don’t follow necessarily traditional news outlets every day, are one of the biggest key movable voting blocs that are out there. So it’s a recognition that these are many of the movable voters that we’re going after.

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