Donald Trump’s Act Seems to Be Wearing Out Its Welcome

New York Times

By Ashley Parker and Amy Chozick

October 7, 2015

Donald Trump’s Act Seems to Be Wearing Out Its Welcome

When Donald J. Trump responded in July to criticism from one of his Republican rivals, Senator Lindsey Graham, by publicly releasing the South Carolina lawmaker’s cellphone number, the public and the press could not get enough of the jaw-dropping stunt.

But on Monday, when Mr. Trump sent a case of Trump brand bottled water to Senator Marco Rubio’s campaign office — poking fun at the Florida senator’s sweaty debate performance and penchant for chugging water — the prank fell notably flat.

While the cellphone gag earned 34,000 mentions in print, broadcast and social media that day, the Rubio water bottle gambit generated just 7,500 mentions — about one-fifth as many — during the same period, according to Zignal Labs, a San Francisco-based analytics company that tracks media.

“A good old Trump stunt just doesn’t generate the media attention that it used to, even on social media,” said Anthony York, an analyst at Zignal Labs.

Though the New York real estate developer still leads the Republican field in national polls, Mr. Trump’s ability to command voter and news media attention simply by being his outlandish, bombastic self is starting to wane. The decline in attention for Mr. Trump seems particularly pronounced in the conservative news media that carry influence over many Republican primary voters.

Though many of the mainstream outlets favored by the Republican establishment — most notably the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal — have always greeted Mr. Trump’s candidacy with a critical, if not disdainful eye, that discomfort has spread to the news media that speak to the populist base of the Republican Party, whose anger at Washington has helped fuel Mr. Trump’s rise. Fox News opinion commentators no longer go on breathlessly about Mr. Trump’s antics, and conservative talk-radio programs have moved on to fawn over Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.

“It’s kind of a like a season of TV shows: Eventually, people burn out on them,” said Erick Erickson, a conservative commentator who runs RedState.com. “We’ve had a season of Trump and the plot hasn’t changed, there’s no new twist, and people are starting to move on to other TV shows.”

After rescinding an invitation to Mr. Trump from an August candidate forum following the candidate’s attack on Megyn Kelly of Fox News, Mr. Erickson said he received the most hate mail and calls of his career. But, he added, after Mr. Trump’s shaky performance in the Sept. 16 Republican debate, many of those readers and listeners tell him they are returning to the fold, spurred in part by the sense that Mr. Trump is not quite the substantive candidate they had originally thought.

“What all the pro-Trump people don’t understand is that conservatives for the past 20 years have been preprogrammed to go beat Hillary Clinton, and if they perceive him as an obstacle to doing that, they’re going to move on,” he said.

The conservative news media has always been somewhat conflicted over Mr. Trump, whose tax policies and positions on social issues do not entirely align with theirs. But for conservative commentators like Ann Coulter, who, like Mr. Trump, is focused almost entirely on stopping illegal immigration, the issue is not that Mr. Trump is losing the support of the conservative news media. It is that he never had unified support in this influential space in the first place.

“The anti-Trump G.O.P. media outlets have gone from blind sputtering hatred to angry contempt and now seem to have settled on impotent rage,” Ms. Coulter said.

News media like CNN also still rely on Mr. Trump to drive ratings, though he is less of a draw than he had been in months after he announced his candidacy. In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Mr. Trump highlighted his position at the top of the field and showed no signs of toning down his bombast. “I’m not going anywhere,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m leading every poll. I’m going to win, and I’m going to make our country great again.”

But there are signs that many voters and commentators have at least started to move on. When Mr. Trump came out strong in the primary polls, the conservative radio personality Glenn Beck, who also owns The Blaze, a TV and digital news outlet, reached out to Mr. Trump’s office to arrange for him to come on the program. But Mr. Beck’s interest in Mr. Trump appears to have cooled. He has had Mr. Carson, Mrs. Fiorina and Mr. Cruz on his nationally syndicated radio program, but said he no longer had any interest in “the circus” of hosting Mr. Trump.

“I think he’s a schoolyard bully who does not reflect any of the values and principles that I see from Americans on both sides,” Mr. Beck said, expressing frustration that the anger Mr. Trump has tapped into is often associated with the Tea Party. “He’s not a Tea Party guy,” he said.

Mr. Trump has tried to use being shunned in the news media to his advantage. But he may have hurt his chances of reaching his voter base when he instigated an on-again, off-again public feud with Fox News — the highest-rated cable TV channel in the country, which holds enormous sway over Republican primary voters — and its chairman and chief executive, Roger E. Ailes.

Mr. Beck, whose program aired on Fox News until 2011, said he questioned Mr. Trump’s endgame. “If I were a betting man, I’d put money on Roger Ailes every time,” Mr. Beck said.

The increasingly negative coverage of Mr. Trump by some conservative news media accompanies a less drastic decline in interest occurring across the mainstream news media and even among some voters.

An analysis by Kalev H. Leetaru, a fellow at George Washington University who studies media and society, found that although Mr. Trump still dominated Republican candidate mentions on network television — nearly 54 percent of all mentions — the blanket coverage started to slowly decline at the end of August and into September. His share of airtime dropped below 40 percent multiple times as candidates like former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, Mr. Carson, Mrs. Fiorina and Mr. Rubio have garnered more attention.

“It’s always the new thing that wins, and at a certain point you reach saturation, and with Trump we’re kind of at a saturation point,” Mr. Leetaru said.

Two.42.Solutions, a nonpartisan media analytics company, also found that voter conversations about Mr. Trump took on a more negative tone after the second debate, during which he sharply criticized several rivals.

“The tide is turning in terms of sentiment, at least for Mr. Trump,” said Mohammad Hamid, a founder and chief technology officer of the company. “Our data shows the bubble will burst. It’s just a matter of when.”

And Zignal Labs found that as Mr. Trump’s share of news media attention declined, Mr. Carson and Mrs. Fiorina had increased shares.

“It’s an interesting question of who is losing who,” said Josh Ginsberg, the chief executive of Zignal Labs. “Are voters reacting off of conservative media, or is conservative media reacting off of voters?”

But, Mr. Ginsberg added, losing the conservative news media could have long-term ramifications for a Trump candidacy.

“Primary voters in states like Iowa or South Carolina or New Hampshire are going to get their cues from these outlets,” he said, “so Trump has really big issues he needs to look at here.”

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