• Media

    Trump’s next move is to create a media company, insiders say

    Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is having a tough time in the polls recently.

    But that may be a part of his short-term strategy to lose the election so that he can do something even bigger over the long term — create a media network, the Trump News Network.

    Trump’s recent drop in the polls has been well-documented. FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast gives him a 12.5 percent chance of winning. The New York Times and Princeton University’s Sam Wang both give his opponent Hillary Clinton an 88 percent chance of winning, too.

    He’s also behind in key battleground states, including Virginia and Colorado, where Clinton’s lead is so large that pollsters have stopped calling them competitive states for this election. Deep red and Republican states have also had their issues — Utah’s not totally on board with the Trump Train, and Texas doesn’t seem like quite a sure thing either for the GOP nominee.

    So, yeah, it looks bad. To fix the drop in the polls, Trump’s reshaped his campaign this week in two major ways. His campaign announced that he will run general election TV ads for the first time, specifically in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada and North Carolina, according to NPR.

    He also hired two new staffers to help him take his campaign forward — Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, as his campaign’s chief executive, and Kellyanne Conway, a pollster, as his campaign manager, according to The New York Times. It was also reported on Monday that he hired Roger Ailes, the former chairman of Fox News who left the company amid sexual harassment allegations, to advise him in his campaign.

    With all these media stars, it’s hard to ignore the idea that Trump’s gearing up for a media push during and even after the election season.

    This is something CNN’s Brian Stelter talked about on CNN Wednesday morning.

    “Thinking past November 8 … Trump has a great team in place for a new television network or digital media startup,” he tweeted.

    The idea isn’t too farfetched. Back in June, Vanity Fair published an exclusive article that talked with Trump insiders who said that the real estate mogul plans to open up his own media network if he loses the 2016 election.

    “Trump is indeed considering creating his own media business, built on the audience that has supported him thus far in his bid to become the next president of the United States,” Vanity Fair reported.

    Trump’s media network would either be a digital startup or something that goes outside of his current TV production company, Trump Productions LLC. He apparently enlisted his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who owns The New York Observer, to help him run this potential media company, Vanity Fair reported.

    Trump allegedly believes that he’s built an audience that will want some sort of community to hear him out if he loses the election.

    One source told Vanity Fair that “win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.”

    It wouldn’t be surprising if this ended up happening since Trump’s campaign seems to be rooted in creating more media attention, and that may also be why he’s “sabotaging” his campaign.

    Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore posted on his website this week that he knows “for a fact” that Trump never wanted to become president. Instead, Trump started his campaign only as a way to get more money and attention for his NBC show “The Apprentice.” He figured he could run a presidential campaign that would corral audience members to the show and inspire NBC to throw down some more money on it.

    But, as Moore explained, things didn’t turn out that way. He said some offensive comments about immigrants and Hispanics that led to NBC firing the celebrity, for starters.

    And then, soon after, Trump saw that his messages were working and that voters were legitimately interested in seeing him become president, according to Moore.

    This would explain why he’s seen such a dip in the polls — why he went after the family of a fallen soldier, why he didn’t endorse Republican leader Paul Ryan and why he claimed President Obama and Clinton were the founders of ISIS. He doesn’t want the presidential job.

    He just wants the attention — a launching point for the future.

    “Many now are sensing the end game here because they know Trump seriously doesn’t want to do the actual job — and, most importantly, he cannot and WILL NOT suffer through being officially and legally declared a loser — LOSER! — on the night of November 8th,” Moore wrote.

    If starting a media company is Trump’s end game, there’s some precedent to back up his play. As Vanity Fair reported, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, who were both popular during the 2008 election cycle, ended up finding some media success.

    But there’s still a long way to go. Entertainment executives told Vanity Fair that the televison industry isn’t breeding much success today, and that Trump’s audience would be extremely limited.

    “It’s a fool’s errand,” this person said. “But then again, we are talking about Donald Trump.”

    You might also like:

    Why does Donald Trump continue to attack the media?

    How Donald Trump is winning over Republican voters, but boggling the media

    33 times Trump insulted the media