If Trump tweeted himself to the presidency, Rhimes has used Twitter to build a bona fide television empire of the sort Trump could only dream of for “The Apprentice.” Kerry Washington, the star of Rhimes’s “Scandal,” has said the cast and Rhimes’s live-tweeting of the show during its first season was critical to its renewal. The opportunity to watch the people involved in making an episode comment on it live wasn’t something that viewers could replicate by streaming the show later. Tweeting through each hour of “Scandal” turned those episodes into major, multiplatform events. And by making themselves available on Twitter, the cast of the show created a special bond with the show’s fans.
Ultimately, this strategy was successful enough that it became the anchor of a whole night of ABC’s program: Dubbed #TGIT for “Thank God It’s Thursday,” the three-hour block of Rhimes’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal” and “How to Get Away With Murder” became a social-media-fueled version of NBC’s “Must See TV” programming from the 1990s. Keeping audiences in their seats, and making sure they were intensely engaged with what they were watching, was a win for ABC, for Rhimes — who has become one of the most powerful showrunners in broadcast television — and for the advertisers who air spots during her shows.
Trump faces a more complicated calculation (if, indeed, he’s capable of weighing the risks and benefits of this approach). Unlike the people involved in “Scandal,” it’s not really in Trump’s interest to draw more attention to the live broadcasts of Comey’s hearing. And it’s definitelynot good for Trump to do anything that makes the audience for it feel more invested in Comey as a character in this spectacle.
Instead, Trump wants to tear down his former FBI director. He can dispute Comey live if he wants to, and if it would make him feel good to do so. But live-tweeting Comey’s testimony also risks that audiences will be able to see any disparity between Trump’s and Comey’s respective self-presentation and the substance of their arguments. That’s not even to mention the fact that a rage-fueled tweetstorm from the president could ultimately end up getting cited in court decisions or investigations.
But if Trump is hell-bent on picking an online fight with Comey, he should at least follow Rhimes’s model for how to do it.
What makes her live-tweeting a treat is that Rhimes explains how she feels about the scenes she’s put on screen, what she was thinking when she wrote them, and how she feels that plot developments tie into or allude to previous developments in her fevered soap opera. Rather than merely lobbing charges of “Sad!” or “low-energy,” Trump should explain his own intentions and feelings in the interactions Comey describes. If he thinks there are facts or context that Comey doesn’t bring up, he should explain them.
To be clear, I don’t think it would be wise for Trump to do any of these things, from either a political or a legal perspective. In fact, I believe live-tweeting Comey’s testimony is a disastrous idea for the president. But who am I to tell the president what to do? If Trump is determined to conduct his presidency with all the frenetic plot twists and back-stabbing of a Shonda Rhimes drama, he should at least learn how to promote the Trump Show from the best in the business.
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