Our own views and client news.
Issue No. 2, 2025
In this issue of Crosswinds: We have had great success with our Branding Texas newsletter that tracks the state’s reputation beyond the Texas borders. We want to now also provide, with our new Crosswinds newsletter, a compilation of our own views about the current state and our national and global media environment.
Thomas Graham
From Doomscrolling To Doomsday?
Everybody now knows that doom scrolling – endlessly searching social media and the search engines for bad and badder news – isn’t good for your health.
If you think otherwise check out my friend Dr. Nicholas Kardaras and his two books “Glow Kids” and “Digital Madness” that speak to how digital tech has affected our mental health.
But now top-tier media – which is to say the mostly left-leaning and mostly shell-shocked media – are creating their own “doom scripts” in anticipation of Donald Trump’s second administration.
For a horrified liberal media, it is a second Halloween – and a House of Horrors that will last for at least four more years.
More method, more experience
I suggest that the media horror is all a bit premature … and not likely to be accurate to what will come when Donald Trump is sworn in – again – on January 20.
Worried reporters and editors, after overwhelming lining up against the Trump candidacy, now envision a dark world in which they will be arrested for offending the majesty of the new President – and they certainly anticipate floods of false news coming unfiltered from red-capped loyalists leaders put in mad command of vast federal agencies.
I predict something much different – which is that the very majesty of the office … and the realization that this second round for President Trump is for legacy and history … will calm the returning President and alter the vibes coming from the Oval Office and the Rose Garden.
I also believe the new President learned a bit from his experience attempting to govern as the 45th President and will take a more methodical, deliberate approach and have a more experienced team around him as the 47th.
More emphasis on digital and social
The press shop will reflect this approach. In my view, this new administration will keep the daily press briefings, a long-standing tradition whose regular scuffles with television personalities make for such good made-for-TV drama, but more emphasis will be placed on digital and social communiques.
Look for a daily White House Briefings podcast, sharing the news directly from the source, agency heads and news of the day experts within the administration and distributed broadly across X and other direct-to-voter social channels.
I also expect a new play on the old fireside chat, a weekly podcast and videoblog directly from President Trump – giving him a platform that again is direct to his audience. He will also cater more to the conservative podcast crowd, much like he did with success in the cresting days of his campaign.
While Harris played to the “Call Her Daddy” audience, Trump and Vance both sat down with Joe Rogan. They were rewarded at the polls.
Also, look for a more active campaign-style rapid response from the tech-savvy team around trump. Information deemed inaccurate will be quickly
Message discipline
Finally, I expect much stronger message discipline from Trump redux. In his first administration, Trump would frequently step on his own positive news. One particular day, I recall an announcement of tens of thousands of jobs returning to the states following a new tax incentive program.
News that should have trended throughout the week, if properly stoked. Instead, within an hour of the favorable headlines, Trump had moved on and was invoking China and its role in polluting our world’s oceans. By the day’s end, the positive news had waned and attention had moved on.
Expect new Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who began her political career in campaign scheduling, to bring more organized structure and discipline to the White House operations – including its press shop.
But the policies will be the same.
The mellowing of Nixon and Johnson
I always keep in mind that the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency came in the arch-conservative Nixon Administration – that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came when a President from Texas, a Southern state more segregated than almost any other than Alabama, navigated passage and signed it into law sixty years ago.
There is a profound and inescapable revolution at work here, more reliably, foreshadowed in the lean-rightward legal essays that have come for two decades from the Federalist Society. And look for more Federalist Society members joining the federal bench where they will actually be more able to change the nation’s direction than even a Republican-dominated Congress.
Leaning right
And as for right-leaning policies, look for more practical conservative policies from the America First Policy Institute to set the tone than the much maligned but broader, more financially driven Heritage Institute. And as for solutions, look to the states. Texas will have greater input on immigration. It already leads on energy, but look for North Dakota and Wyoming to have greater sway.
Those profound changes and those messages will be irrefutably substantive and won’t be popular at all with liberal-leaning reporters, editors and producers. And, yes, many of the federal agencies that have long ago lost their purpose will now be targeted for dismantling or at least disarmed.
And the federal license for the big broadcasters might very well be reviewed, but I doubt they’ll be repealed, although I would be surprised if not a few current and comfortable media monopolies are disturbed or disrupted when under closer scrutiny. Broadcast isn’t the future anyway in a world dominated by digital streaming – so the nation’s flow of information won’t ground to a halt even if that decades-long squatting by billionaires on federally-owned airwaves would come to an sudden end.
But vast metropolitan areas of the country won’t be repolluted over the next four years, electric car owners won’t be arrested (remember Elon is his pal), reporters won’t be locked up for truth-telling … and President Trump will not suddenly stop pushing whatever came to mind out his mouth or into a podcast within just a few seconds.
Trump is not a young man and as people age, they say (or post) aloud too often what the rest of us may only think. That will be untidy at times, and need cleanup by aides. That is not evidence of senility.
A mellower President?
I am actually betting on a more mellow Donald Trump overall – returning power to the states, yes, when he and a Republican Congress and an aligned judiciary can … but mostly not interfering with the course even the most liberal states have taken. Abortion is a good example of that. And watch for more sly victories against him at state and local levels from a women’s movement that still loathes him and aren’t ready to take on the red robes of The Handmaid’s Tale.
He won’t interfere much with what liberal California and Massachusetts choose to do, certainly with their own money, but those states may find the federal funding of their generous public works and edgier medical practices severely curtailed.
The real news may be tracking how those who oppose Trump will maneuver around him and any obstacles his own fervent loyalists will try to put in his path.
Stay tuned – the show has just begun.
Thomas Graham, president and CEO of Crosswind Media & Public Relations in Austin TX, is also the author of the Branding Texas column, which keeps a sharp eye on the way Texas is perceived by media and influencers beyond the borders of the Lone Star State.
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