The GOP nominee’s surrogates kept redirecting the conversation to preferred territory Sunday.
By PATRICK REIS 08/07/16 12:32 PM EDT
Donald Trump’s campaign surrogates were rigorously on message Sunday morning, brushing past a week’s worth of their candidate’s controversies to relentlessly focus on two related themes: the need to make America great again and Hillary Clinton’s inability to do so.
When Florida Gov. Rick Scott was grilled by Chuck Todd, host of NBC's "Meet the Press," about why Trump wouldn’t release his tax returns, Scott, who’s working on a Trump-aligned super PAC, continually changed the subject to Trump’s promised ability to create jobs and questions about the ethics of the Clinton Foundation.
“Everybody does things differently; not every candidate releases tax returns,” Scott said. “But Chuck, this election is about jobs. Donald Trump knows how to create jobs. Hillary Clinton, a career politician, has never created a job.”
Also on "Meet the Press," retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn worked to smooth out Trump's messaging on NATO, saying there is broad consensus around modernizing the treaty organization — pushing back on Clinton campaign attempts to paint Trump's NATO remarks as destabilizing, or even reflective of a shift toward a pro-Russia stance at the expense of some U.S. allies.
And former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, on ABC’s "This Week," ripped Clinton for claiming FBI Director James Comey had agreed with her claims about handling classified information on her personal email server — a statement that Clinton ascribed to having “short-circuited” after many pointed out it was at odds with what Comey had said.
“I wouldn’t hire a person as an assistant U.S. attorney if that was in their FBI background,” Giuliani said. “We’re going to make her president of the United States?”
“She lied,” he said. “She didn't short-circuit. She lied last week when she said the FBI found that she'd hadn't lied. You read Comey's report; he found she lied in about eight different places. So maybe short-circuit is her euphemism for lying,"
Also, Jason Miller — Trump’s senior communications adviser, who appeared on a panel on CNN's "State of the Union" — said Trump’s sagging poll numbers would rise as he won voters over, an argument similar to the one Giuliani laid out on the same program.
“Eight points down at this stage, of course, you'd rather be ahead,” Giuliani said. “Everyone should calm down about it.”
Trump's surrogates got ample opportunity to make their voice heard Sunday on CNN. On "Reliable Sources," host Brian Stelter, who had a highly publicized and combative interview with Miller last week, had a panel composed entirely of Trump supporters, following Trump campaign complaints — including in a Saturday night tweet from Trump himself — that they were working against a biased media.
The surrogates steered clear of the controversies and distractions that dogged Trump the past week, including his feud with a Gold Star family, his initial refusal to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan before doing so Friday and a flap over his reaction to a crying baby at one of his rallies.
It was, in short, what many Republican strategists have called on Trump to do: keep the focus off his controversies and on Clinton. Trump will have the opportunity to stay on that subject matter this week, when he goes to Detroit tomorrow to deliver a speech about his plans for the U.S. economy. The nominee is expected to outline broad tax cuts, and he has floated the idea of large-scale bond-financed infrastructure investments.
The actual contents of his speech, however, are likely to keep listeners in suspense.
Thus far in the general election, Trump has eschewed message discipline in favor of a freewheeling approach that often leads him into reopening past spats, whether with members of the media, with fellow Republicans or with just about anyone else who has criticized him publicly.
Trump’s lone public contribution Sunday morning was a tweet attacking Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who jousted with Miller on the CNN panel and, along with former Bernie Sanders spokeswoman Symone Sanders, painted a dismal picture of Trump’s prospects.
“I see where Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake of Baltimore is pushing Crooked hard. Look at the job she has done in Baltimore. She is a joke!” Trump wrote.
Trump's tweet omitted the word “Hillary.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/minus-trump-trump-campaign-stays-on-message-226770
