Each year end, public relations (PR) practitioners are quizzed on what they think are the top-five PR crises of the year.
Since I work more in politics than in business, I chose to consider the top five political – presidential – PR crises.
These are, from the inside, fairly obvious.
Number one has to be Trump getting shot, then almost immediately starting to manage the message even before a negative one could get out there.
He did this by fist-bumping the sky (on camera) and shouting “Fight, Fight, Fight.”
Surviving being shot could have proved a disaster, for one simple reason. If Trump had cowered or even reacted stunned, he could be painted as “less than” by an unfriendly media. The whole world would have seen it, so no post-shooting response could walk back an “apparently” cowardly reaction. But Trump instinctively reacted as the street-fighter his bio likes to suggest he once was, and it actually played well.
The second crisis was the aftermath of the disastrous Biden-Trump debate. Actually, the disaster wasn’t so much of a failed debate, but the media’s – and the Democrat leadership’s – collective reaction.
I watched it all and I felt, with the exception of one moment (the famous Medicare line) the debate was a near-draw. In fact, I told my wife – also a seasoned political campaign pro – that I was disappointed that Trump let his anger get in the way. I frankly expected the Dems would rally around the president.
After all, in each election season, the ultimately winning candidate lost – big – an earlier debate, but rallied back. Even Reagan, the great communicator and 49-state victor in 1984, lost his first debate with Walter Mondale, of all people.
But the crisis for Biden was the way his own leading Democrats talked themselves into a feeding frenzy of horror at having Biden for a candidate. They kept pushing one another (and Biden), forcing him to step down until, three weeks later, he could no longer mount a viable campaign.
His was the first presidential coup d’état – admittedly a bloodless one – in American history. Never before had a sitting president, nominated and running for re-election, been forced out by his own party.
However, a vengeful Biden cleverly played against that putsch. He’d originally picked beyond long-shot Kamala Harris for his vice president as “insurance” against a 25th Amendment run-around that would have removed him from office.
Seeing how weak and ineffective Harris was as VP, nobody would rationally try to push Biden out. Not until the debate made him look – to his opponents – like a loser.
So, as a kind of revenge against those so-called party loyalists, starting with President Obama and including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders who kept pushing to get Biden out, Biden got the last laugh.
Successfully, long before they could organize a quick-response open primary election to nominate some legitimate political heavyweight could be scheduled, Biden endorsed Harris in a way that made her the only plausible candidate.
I’m sure he’s still laughing all the way to the bank.
Trump’s big crisis – if he’d only let it be a crisis – and the third of the top five presidential PR crises in 2024, occurred when he was convicted on roughly three dozen felony charges in New York State court.
That should have been an election campaign-destroying moment.
However, by refusing to acknowledge this as a defeat – as only Trump could do – Trump succeeded by proceeding as if he had not been convicted. I’d bet even money he could have passed a lie detector test on that question.
By ignoring the “pressure” of a press he despised, and frequently ran rings around, Trump kept garnering grassroots support. Being shot (see above) turned out to be beneficial, in that it showed him to be a fighter, at a time when America desperately wanted a fighter.
However, in this case, his management of the crisis was to ignore it. Period. And it worked.
Trump doesn’t play well with the press at the best of times, so ignoring them at the worst of times seemed like business-as-usual. He’s still the only “felon” to be elected, and in a short while he’ll be the only “felon” to be inaugurated president.
Trump will continue to ignore those convictions until, eventually, those “felonies” are proved bogus.
Legally, they are bogus, but that doesn’t mean the Trump Derangement Syndrome-afflicted part of the public – or a major part of the media – doesn’t still see him as a “felon.”
Despite his victory, Trump will still be derided by his opponents as a “felon.” So he will go down in the left-leaning history books that way, not that he will care. He continues to defy all standards of PR and crises, because he refuses to play by the establishment rules.
The fourth crisis – Biden’s almost non-stop vacation through the latter half of 2024.
He just didn’t show up. For once he was like Trump, in that he ignored the rules, doing precisely what he wanted, while his “Chatty Kathy” wind-up press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, denied that anything at all was wrong.
Ignoring the press – and all press questions on that subject – Biden and KJP borrowed a page from the Obama playbook by vacationing from coast to coast, even during national disasters worse than the one that almost torpedoed Bush the Younger’s presidency. He just ignored it, and – unable to get a rise out of him, or even an acknowledgement from him – the press finally had to drop it for lack of anybody caring.
All presidents take lots of vacations, especially to family “compounds,” in part because the job has the potential to take a lot out of a person.
But also in part because presidents take their National Security Council and lots of staff members with him. So he could have claimed that he wasn’t “really” on vacation.
But Joe didn’t even do that. He ignored the issue completely until the press let it go. In this way, Biden acted like Trump, proving particularly adept at ignoring the press until a potential crisis just went away.
Trump does it by intent – Biden almost by default – but for both it worked to defuse a crisis.
Finally, the last (in all meanings of that word) political crisis of 2024 is Biden’s tone-deaf pardoning of his son, Hunter, perhaps the most manifestly politically corrupt man in American history.
Like Trump, Hunter’s been convicted of a number of real felonies (federal no less). But unlike Trump, he’s so manifestly guilty, and so soon set to be imprisoned, that Hunter couldn’t ignore it. What he could do is get daddy to destroy his own political legacy, going all the way back to his first term in office – not in the presidency, but in the Senate back in the early 1970s.
Biden will go down as the least honest, least legal, most corrupt president in American history. His reputation is shattered.
All because he went back on his often-spoken (on camera and before large crowds) refusal to pardon Hunter – right up until he actually pardoned Hunter. Worse, he not only pardoned Hunter for all crimes he’d been convicted of or even charged with, but also for all crimes as yet unknown by the Department of Justice or the public.
Never again will Biden be considered an honest man, or even a moderately (or marginally) honest man. He lied about the pardons, but he issued them without an ounce of shame.
Worse, since Big Guy Joe is so completely entangled with Hunter in many of the more juicy, unsavory corruption and bribery cases over the past decade, he could arguably be pardoning himself, de facto if not de jure.
If Hunter isn’t tried for a crime, suggesting that crime didn’t happen, how can Joe then be tried for the same crime, one that apparently didn’t even happen? Worse, Hunter was convicted by a DOJ largely thought to be in Biden’s hip pocket. That’s considered a measure of how truly and egregiously guilty Hunter was. After all, if Biden’s hip-pocket DOJ would prosecute, let alone convict, the president’s son, the crime must have been stench-ridden to a very great degree.
However, this is a crisis for Biden because he’ll be president just long enough to let the media actually go after him – which, in this case, they will (since he lied to them about it before he lied to the American people), but Biden won’t be in office long enough to switch the narrative around by years of toeing the mark, or by playing nice-nice with the media, in that way slowly rebuilding his reputation.
Once he’s out, he’ll seem so defeated and irrelevant as to make it not worth most reporters’ time to pursue the truth about the pardons and all the rest.
So that’s my top-five presidential PR crises of 2024 – what are yours?
