I criticized him for a bad PR move on the Reiners' murder; it's only fair to acknowledge his brilliant moves leading up to Wednesday Night

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How Trump Used Tucker Carlson’s Stupidity, Gullibility, and Paranoia to Score a Free Primetime Speech

Scott Pinsker:

In political PR, the real story is the story behind the story.

Take, for instance, President Trump’s primetime address. It aired Wednesday night; here’s a link if you missed it. Millions of Americans watched it live.

But the real story was what happened behind the scenes.

The TV networks don’t like forfeiting ad revenue — especially during the season finale of (gasp) Survivor, for goodness sake — and they expect a presidential address to feature breaking news. If you’re gonna preempt their precious marquee programming, you better deliver something salacious!

Like war, pestilence, famine, and death. (You know, the good stuff.)

The TV networks were expecting a galloping quartet of fast-breaking news.

But that wasn’t Trump’s goal. He simply wanted to reset his PR response to the so-called “affordability crisis” that had stymied GOP candidates. (And if you read yesterday’s PR column, you already know his speech was an extraordinarily successful earworm — and tactically, from the narrative framing to Trump’s loud, high-energy delivery, it was all absolutely deliberate.)

Other than sending free money to military members, virtually no news was broken. Had the major networks known this, they would’ve denied Trump the airtime, and that’s an ironclad, slam-dunk guarantee.

…. This led to an epic game of cat-and-mouse, where the White House kept its cards close to its vest, and everyone in the media guessed what the heck the president might say.

And that’s when the White House unloaded its big gun: Conservative pundit-turned-political shock jock Tucker Carlson.

Always on the lookout for warmongering Jews “Neocon Zionists,” Carlson is convinced that America is perpetually on the brink of World War III, because… well, something-something-Israel. (Tucker’s logic is hard to follow, mostly because it’s not very logical.)

[Tucker told us that bombing Iran’s nuclear sites would lead to “thousands of American deaths” and would become “America’s war”]

….

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Is Trump going to start a war in Venezuela?

[…]

Tucker Carlson: Here’s what I know so far, which is that members of Congress were briefed yesterday [Tuesday] that a war is coming, and it’ll be announced in the address to the nation tonight at 9:00 by the president. […] A member of Congress told me that this morning.

But [Caputo’s debunking] was too late. 

With rumors of war reverberating, the TV networks were trapped: War is the ultimate ratings-grabber; none of ‘em wanted to be asleep at the switch when the president announced that the dogs of war were released. 

That’s major news!

And Donald Trump is so gosh-darn unpredictable, maybe he really was about to invade Venezuela. The media didn’t know what to do. After comparing him to Hitler for a decade, it certainly seemed plausible.

Besides, if a member of Congress point-blank told Tucker Carlson that the White House briefed congressional leaders, that’s eyewitness testimony. Tucker got the scoop directly from a firsthand source. That’s about as official as it gets!

….

Regardless, the White House deftly leveraged Carlson’s childlike gullibility and/or willful stupidity to claim primetime real estate on all the major networks. Congrats to pundits like Michael Knowles and Jack Posobiec for connecting the dots: