Much as he did in 2016, President Donald Trump is dominating media coverage during the 2020 presidential race.
However, Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz believes this strategy has the potential to backfire on the president this year given that he's an incumbent president with disapproval ratings consistently above 50 percent.
The problem, as Kurtz sees it, is that Trump is setting up the election to be a straight-up referendum on his first term rather than a choice between him and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
"The overshadowing of Biden is frequently yielding a dynamic that’s the opposite of what the president’s campaign wants, making the election essentially a referendum on Trump," Kurtz writes. "The fiercest debates seem to be Trump and his allies against his detractors, or the president versus the press, with Biden just one voice in the chorus."
Kurtz also notes that the Biden campaign seems more than happy to keep Trump in the spotlight.
"His campaign clearly believes that ceding much of the stage keeps the harsh limelight on Trump," he writes. "The president can still use his mighty megaphone to control the narrative of this race in the final weeks. The question is whether that helps him after years of saturation coverage, and whether there are still that many minds to be changed."
