A Legendary Political PR Pro Has Some Advice for Donald Trump | Opinion

If you’re interested in how former President Donald Trump is faring as a presidential candidate right now, you could do worse than to ask Morty Matz. He has practiced public relations since 1955—last month he turned 100—and specialized in the art and science of getting elected officials out of trouble. (Full disclosure: I was his employee from 1991 to 1994).
Former president Trump currently qualifies as being up to his neck in trouble by almost any definition. For starters, he’s still facing multiple indictments, and most recently, a felony conviction. He’s up against a mainstream media environment that’s largely hostile toward him. Plus, he’s now running against a revitalized Vice President Kamala Harris rather than a beleaguered Joe Biden.
Matz has gone around the block a few times with politicians. He advised Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign as a Democratic delegate for New York State in 1976. Mario Cuomo, then New York’s lieutenant governor, asked him to be his campaign press secretary for his first run for governor (Matz declined in order to keep running his PR firm. He has also represented members of the U.S. Congress, the New York State Senate and the New York City Council.
His political clients were almost all Democrats, if only because New York City, his headquarters, traditionally swings overwhelmingly Democratic. But Matz often worked across the aisle. Early on, he lent a hand on local campaigns to Vincent Albano, chairman of the New York County Republican Committee, by most accounts an old-school, quid-pro-quo, Boss-Tweed-like party boss.
But Matz established much of his reputation in politics as a maestro of crisis management. He operated behind the scenes in many a messy public controversy, particularly those involving elected officials. All in all, he navigated crises for at least 10 politicians who were indicted and, in some cases, convicted and sent to prison. Many of the politicians he represented approached him in the first place expressly because they were in trouble. Indeed, as some wags joked, he might as well have hung a sign outside his office saying, “If you’re indicted, you’re invited.”
Matz demonstrated a knack not only for getting some stories about his clients into the papers, but also for “killing” other stories. He deployed all the tactics, techniques and bargaining tricks in his arsenal—from keeping secrets and leaking exclusives to trading personal favors and inside information—to slant coverage in favor of his clients. Or, as a highly accomplished journalist who has long known him told me, Matz stopped bombs from exploding before the public even knew a bomb existed in the first place.
For Matz, a standard gambit for protecting pols in dire straits was to retain sharp legal counsel. Often the key to getting a politician out of trouble was finding a good lawyer. He represented many lawyers as clients, so he knew which were good. He also represented detectives and district attorneys, so he understood how the courts, the criminal justice system and politics all worked together. He introduced politicians in trouble to lawyers he knew to be strong in managing emergencies. One time, the lawyer he secured for a congressman who was facing a potentially long trial got the case thrown out of court.
“It’s the nature of politics that politicians get into trouble,” Matz recently told me. “They may try to cut corners. They may even ask you to do something off the straight path. They also live under constant scrutiny. Almost everything they say and do gets covered in the media. My job was to change how the public perceived my clients. So, I advised them what to say and what to avoid saying.”
Matz recently offered his opinions about what Trump is doing right—and wrong—according to the best practices of public relations. He also shared his advice about how Trump could—and should—be performing much better.
Matz acknowledges that Trump has a unique talent as a lightning rod. “His strategy is clearly to garner attention 24 hours a day,” he observes. “He knows how to succeed at it. He manages it by doing his shtick. It’s the same shtick he’s done his whole career. Donald Trump is always going to be Donald Trump. At times he can be a normal human being. But to him it’s all a TV show. The cultural category I put him in? He’s the Kim Kardashian of politics.”
On the flip side, Matz readily recognizes that Trump faces monumental challenges including many of his own creation. Unlike Harris, for example, he could actually wind up imprisoned. Matz particularly criticizes how Trump treats the news media. “What Trump is doing with the media is terrible,” he says. “He keeps attacking it. He’s made it the enemy. I would recommend he stop doing that. He should use the media to boost his image and highlight whatever is good about him. He could try going on CNN and MSNBC for a change. But he should do that only if he does a better job of sticking to a script.”
Would he take Trump on as a client if given the chance? No, Matz says he would decline. He rarely turns down such opportunities, though he made an exception for movie producer Harvey Weinstein, ultimately sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault. “I would never represent Trump,” Matz says. “He’s beyond repair. I would represent him only if he were reborn. And I would start by introducing him to better lawyers.”
As for handicapping the outcome on Election Day, Matz admits he’s unsure who will win. “Trump with all his negatives was riding high until recently,” he says. “But in the end it may all still come crashing down on him.”
Bob Brody, a public relations consultant and essayist living in Italy, is the author of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.