Lessons from Trump's media team

Where Harris gained, moderates overperform, the end of the decline of Christianity, where the college-educated are moving, two AI agents walk into a bar, East Germany before it was cool

No. 351 | February 28th, 2025

🇺🇲 2024

This was a terrific lessons-learned piece from Trump 2024 media strategist John Brabender. Some of what the campaign learned:

“Reality TV worked better than feature films.” — Nothing beat the ability to use Kamala Harris’s own words to define her. The campaign’s ads were less about the individual issue and more about demonstrating how far-left she was.

“Speed kills… and so does ‘content velocity.’” — Anticipate events and have have ads pre-made to release as quickly as possible. Be your own news distributor.

“Repetition was critical.” — The Harris campaign had too many creatives on the air at once — 6 to 8 times what Trump had — which didn’t allow any one of them to sink in.

“The voters aren’t buying a drill… they’re buying holes.” — “Start with a problem and how it affected the voter personally. Position Biden/Harris as the root of the problem and President Trump as the solution. Rarely did we start with President Trump or feature him throughout an a…