Winning by targeting straws that don't suck

How Trump is cribbing from the Bill Clinton playbook crafted by Dick Morris with straws, student sports and other seemingly penny-ante measures

Then-president Bill Clinton speaks with students. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons, graphic by Kaylie Klausing/24sight News.)

Having ripped Make America Great Again from Ronald Reagan’s ‘80s two terms, Donald Trump is now moving onto the next two-term President of the United States of his prime: Bill Clinton in the ‘90s.

In personal ways, Trump and Clinton had the standard Boomer scandals on avoiding Vietnam and extramarital affairs. But what’s underreported is just how similar Trump’s second term in the 2020s is mirroring some of the cultural wars of the Clinton 1990s. 

And even some of the same Clinton-era characters are back. Dick Morris, who just wrote about Trump’s “Big 2024 Comeback” and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who played an integral role in Trump’s third run for the White House and staffing the new administration.

For Trump, these are his people, contemporaries who understand that monogamous marriage is hard for powerful men and voters don't care about a politician’s personal life, anyway. (Clinton proved that for Trump in the 1990s.)

But what we’re living through now has a decidedly Clinton-era political subtext.  

In the 1990s, Morris famously helped Clinton focus on a set of relatively low-stakes cultural issues that were both broadly popular and relatively easy to implement either because you get credit for just talking about them or those impacted were relatively powerless to fight back.

Clinton

While he was Building a Bridge to the 21^st Century, Clinton was paying outsized attention to technology and kids, at levels disproportionately popular in messaging, but not impact. 

The first of these was Clinton’s support for v-chips, actual computer chips embedded into televisions to block out violence. 

The public support for it was 72% in a 1995 public opinion poll, which drove it into the State of the Union Address in 1996. 

“Our first challenge is to cherish our children and strengthen America’s families,” Clinton said at the time. “I call on Congress to pass the requirement for v-chip in TV sets so that parents can screen out programs they believe are inappropriate for their children.” 

The provision ended up in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Ultimately, the issue was much ado about not very much as parents never widely used the technology.

That same year, Clinton staked out space in the perceived political center in a radio address about providing “a new manual” to local school districts on how to adopt school uniforms to “break the cycle of violence” in our schools. 

This was a reaction to student killings over expensive sneakers and other designer clothing. 

The polling was supportive: 70% of principals felt school uniforms reduced discipline problems. However, as of five years ago, only 19% of all schools require uniforms but 57% of private schools do. 

Again, big issue, low adoption.

Trump

While Trump is heralding a New Golden Age for America he has picked up the Clintonian high-messaging-low-impact focus on technology and kids. 

Lost in the flurry of DOGE-related activity was a late-week pivot to something that is broadly popular and commonsensical: America’s near-universal hatred of paper straws. 

A 2023 poll showed that while 59% of Americans would prefer a plastic straw and 74% have used one in the past week. I suspect Dick Morris has more recent polling that reinforces Trump’s instincts that reversing the Biden-era plan to phase out plastic straws by 2027 by executive order is an easy political win. 

Echoing Clinton in wanting to protect children from violence, Trump signed an executive order banning biological boys from competing in girls sports. The NCAA followed with a similar ban. 

Where is the public on this? From 2021 to 2023, Gallup found an increase of 7% to a 69% supermajority of Americans who believe students should only be able to compete in the sports that match their birth gender.

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So it’s a Big Message win for Trump, consistent with his campaign, but how widespread of a problem is it? A story from Newsweek said it was 15 high school students nationwide and “likely” less than 100 at the university level.

Both Clinton’s high-visibility issues and Trump’s masked other issues for which there were broader societal implications. Clinton’s partnership with Gingrich on moving people from welfare to work was viewed as a centrist move at the time and was widely supported. This met the public views of welfare of the moment.

Trump’s actions on foreign aid, specifically on USAID, are also broadly popular but impactful to the societies the agency was helping. A 2024 online survey found that only 26% of Americans said that defending human rights in other countries should be a top priority.

In both cases, Clinton and Trump, they had/have the public on their side for both the small ball and large ball issues, making critics seem small by comparison. Note: at this writing, Trump’s approval rating is +5%. Reminder: small ball wins.

Obama?

Now that Trump owns Reagan’s messaging and Clinton’s micro-policymaking strategery, what’s next? 

Trump has already cribbed from Reagan and Clinton, which leaves only two more modern two-term presidents: George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bush is still viewed as a failure, but Obama isn’t.

Which leads to this obvious scenario: Trump goes for the trifecta of a third term, and hires the Obama Pod Save America crew, who will be looking for a second act in 2028.

(If you think either one of these is completely a joke, you may want to double-check just how many Overton Windows have moved lately.) 

Joking aside, small ball is all about messaging and juicing popularity to move the things you really want. In Clinton’s case it was reelection. In Trump’s case, it’s a third term he still believes was stolen from him.

Michael Cohen, is the author of the book Modern Political Campaigns, president of Cohen Research Group and a 30-year veteran of the polling industry. He writes The Level regularly for 24sight News, analyzing polling and campaign trends with a keen eye and level-headed approach.