The Optics of Revenge: Behind the Scenes of the Trump Campaign with Axios’ Alex Isenstadt
AP Photo/Rick Scuteri
Axios senior political reporter Alex Isenstadt’s new book Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power makes one thing clear — President Donald Trump’s comeback campaign was a visual spectacle as much as it was a political operation.
“One of the things you can’t understate with Trump is his understanding of the power of imagery,” Isenstadt told Mediaite editor Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Press Club. “That’s something a lot of run-of-the-mill politicians simply don’t understand.”
He pointed to the moment after the Butler assassination attempt this summer when Trump, bloodied, raised his fist. “How many people do you know who would come within a hair of dying and that’s their first instinct? He symbolized to his supporters what they wanted: a guy who would fight for them.”
Trump leaned hard into those kinds of displays and symbolism — from standing next to garbage trucks after Democrats called his supporters trash, to visiting East Palestine, Ohio, after its train derailment, to his work behind a McDonald’s counter in Pennsylvania.
“People felt like the federal government and Joe Biden had abandoned them. Trump shows up and mingles with these people— that image, a lot of people on his campaign think helped turn things around.”
Revenge is a deeply reported, fly-on-the-wall account of the campaign that catapulted Trump back to the White House, for which Isenstadt conducted more than 300 interviews. One of his most eye-popping scoops was that Trump’s campaign got a thirty-minute advance warning of questions for a Fox News town hall last January.
“It was like a student getting the test questions in advance,” Isenstadt said. “Trump was pissed because they were harder questions than he thought they were going to be.”
And then there was Trump’s reliance on independent media, through which Trump spoke to younger and less politically-engaged audiences. His youngest son, the 18-year-old New York University student Barron Trump, figured prominently in that strategy.
“Barron Trump became a figure in organizing this podcast push,” Isenstadt said. “Trump did everything from Joe Rogan to Theo Von. It really shows how Trump outmaneuvered Kamala Harris in the podcast space.”
Even as Trump continues to bash mainstream outlets and crack down on the press from the White House, he still cares what they think, Isenstadt said. “If you don’t care about The Atlantic, then why would you spend a couple paragraphs on Truth Social attacking them?”
Isenstadt also dished on Sean Hannity’s behind-the-scenes attempt to broker peace between Trump and Rupert Murdoch, the decoy plane Trump used to dodge an alleged Iranian assassination plot, and what it was like reporting inside the most chaotic campaign in modern political history.
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