In June, Trump's campaign posted a tiktok of Trump and influencer Logan Paul. The two stood glaring at each other, their noses inches apart.
And then something rare happened: Trump laughed.
@realdonaldtrump Face off with @Logan Paul ♬ Way down We Go - KALEO
Both of them dissolved into laughs, in fact – Paul gave a delighted, "Yo, yo, I'm scared, bro!" There was even something approaching a hug.
The point of all this was to promote a Trump interview on Paul's podcast and YouTube show.
It was all part of Trump and JD Vance's months-long tour of podcasters and influencers — almost all of them men, many of them young.
The conversations are often friendly and chatty. In multiple interviews, Trump has shot the breeze with hosts about the UFC and boxing.
In one memorable exchange, Paul asked Trump if he had ever been in a fistfight. Trump's answer, after a long pause: "Probably not."
According to the Trump campaign, the goal with this media strategy is simply to reach as many people as possible…not specifically men.
But…that IS who they're getting, and it comes as young men have pulled hard toward Trump. That has opened up a gender gap among young voters – who just so happen to have low voting rates. So maybe, the thinking seems to go, a few conversations about UFC can give the young men specifically a kick out the door.
Expanding their reach...mostly to men
Trump and Vance have appeared on nine podcasts, according to the campaign. Of those, market research firm Edison Research had data on seven.
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Six of those seven have majority-male listenership, and five of those have at least three-quarters male listenership, with audiences that also skew mostly young. Meanwhile, only one podcast — Phil in the Blanks, with Doctor Phil McGraw — has majority women listeners.
What it amounts to is potential new young men voters getting long, intimate, not-terribly-newsy introductions to Trump and Vance by trusted hosts-slash-friends, with whom these listeners have already spent countless hours.
That means the conversations can humanize Trump and Vance, rather than focusing on the news of the day. For example, podcaster Theo Von spoke at length with Trump about Trump's late brother, Fred, and his struggles with alcoholism.
"Do you remember the last time you spent with your brother?"
"I do. And. He'd have periods where he'd get sick, very sick. And we thought we'd lose him or we lost him and he get better."
Not only was it about as vulnerable as a Trump conversation gets, but Von emphasized that this is an issue that connects to his fans – "A lot of our audience struggles or has struggled with alcoholism, addiction, intimacy disorders, all types of stuff, you know," he said.
Von and many other of these influencers have shows that are roughly an hour long – sometimes more. And in those long interviews, many hosts aren't fact-checking or pushing back all that much.
In some cases, the hosts are outright supporters. Streamer Adin Ross gave Trump a watch and a Tesla cybertruck.
Occasionally, though, Trump and Vance have received harsher scrutiny. At a recent event, one host of the All In podcast pressed Vance multiple times on whether he would have certified the 2020 election. Vance would not say yes.
"I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we have," Vance said.
"You wouldn't have certified, to be clear," said host Jason Calacanis.
"I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates," Vance repeated.
Has Trump hit his ceiling?
The podcast-and-influencer strategy is a way to solve a particular problem, says Eric James Wilson, a Republican strategist who specializes in digital communication.
That problem is that people get their information from thousands of different sources. So one route of reaching voters is what Wilson calls bottom-up – like canvassing, texting, or telling people to talk to their friends. This strategy is the opposite route.
"The second route is top down, where voters have these parasocial relationships with maybe a podcast host or a YouTuber," Wilson said. "And so they're relying on that to reach voters that they can't reach in other places."
All of this makes sense, according to Shauna Daly, a cofounder of the liberal Young Men's Research Initiative. In her opinion, Trump has hit his ceiling with likely voters. If that's true…
"In order to win, he needs to change the electorate," she said. "And young men historically are less likely to vote, but if he can turn them out, if he can get them to vote, that could change the electorate enough to give him a margin of victory."
Recent polls have shown a wide gender gap among young voters, with young men leaning more toward Trump. So one goal of these appearances may be to nudge a few of those many non-voting young guys into voting.
Could it work? At latest count, that Logan Paul-Trump interview has 6.5 million views on youtube. If a fraction of those are the right viewers in the right states, it might make a world of difference.
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