1/8/19
President Donald Trump is planning a prime-time national address tonight about his border wall, or whatever he’s now calling it, and the government shutdown. Don’t expect much. We have plenty of evidence on this one: Presidential speeches rarely change minds. See, for example, this post from John Sides preceding Barack Obama’s 2009 speech to Congress on health care. As he notes, it’s not that voters all have strong opinions on policy questions; it’s that those voters most likely to tune in to such a speech are the partisans least likely to change their minds, either about the policy or the president. Going public – the strategy of trying to win support from the people at large, in the hopes that they’ll pressure their representatives to follow the president – mostly didn’t work for Ronald Reagan, didn’t work for Bill Clinton, and didn’t work for Obama. It’s even less likely to work for Trump, who is less popular now than those presidents were for most of their time in office, and who is trying to sell a policy that consistently polls badly. At best, Trump’s speech might solidify Republican support. Unfortunately for him, prime-time speeches haven’t dominated viewing options for years. When Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter spoke to the nation, viewers were pretty much held hostage, barring the truly radical option of turning off the set. By Clinton’s time, there were plenty of other choices available; these days, many viewers won’t have any idea that the president has pre-empted normal network programming.
So if popular presidents couldn’t convince voters when they had a monopoly of the airwaves (when airwaves mattered), there’s no reason at all to think that Trump will change anything. On the other hand, there are risks. Trump will remind those opponents who tune in why they dislike him and his wall. He’ll put himself even further out on a ledge, meaning that his reputation will take a bigger hit when he eventually doesn’t get his way. Overall, speeches of this kind – addresses intended to sway public opinion about an already announced policy – just aren’t very important, even though the context here, the government shutdown and immigration policy, certainly is. That’s not to say that broadcast and cable-news producers shouldn’t think hard about how to present the statement of a president who is often aggressively wrong about the facts. They should. It’s just that whatever he says, true or false, is unlikely to change the trajectory of the shutdown or the public’s opinion of it. The networks turned down a request from Obama for a prime-time address in 2014. Trump is getting this one, but it may mean that they’ll turn him down next time. It probably won’t help that his request is premised on a fictional national-security emergency.
