Frank Luntz is taught a lesson.
Donald Trump is all but accusing a top Republican pollster of trying to shake him down.
After the presidential debate on Thursday night, Fox News featured a focus group conducted by Frank Luntz that utterly slammed Trump. On Monday, Trump told Business Insider that he thought he was panned by Luntz’s group because he declined to hire Luntz’s research firm.
“This has been going on, he’s putting the arm on me all the time, and then he does these polls that are totally in violation of every other poll that was done,” Trump said of Luntz.
Trump said post-debate polls that show he remains ahead of the GOP field prove the focus group was wrong. He further described Luntz, a regular contributor to Fox News and one of the country’s best-known conservative consultants, as “unfair” and “terrible.”
“I watch this guy do a really negative report on me, and the only reason he did it, in my opinion, is because I didn’t want to hire him commercially,” Trump said of Luntz. “I think it’s disgusting … I think he uses his power at Fox to maybe — to get work.”
In a phone call with Business Insider, Luntz vehemently denied Trump’s accusation…
“Even if I say things that candidates don’t like, I don’t expect them to take it personally. I don’t expect them to launch World War III.”
Too late, World War III has already been launched tubby. Watch your ass next time, or Trump’ll make it worse. It speaks volumes that none of these pogues have any idea what to do once the people they try to screw not only don’t take it, they screw them back twice as hard.
Notice, openly accusing Luntz of this may exploit the Trumpian hyperbole effect, where the population will be less likely to adopt Trump’s exact position due to the extreme nature of his accusation, but the extremeness of the accusation will cause the average view of the masses to instinctively take a position midway between Trump’s position and Luntz’s as most likely to be true. Now whenever Luntz says anything, the public perception of his veracity will be much more affected than it would have been if Donald accused him weakly of being only slightly corrupt.
Obviously this will affect his ability to get on the media outlets and pimp his brand.
Don’t mess with the Donald. He’ll kick your ass and use it to get publicity for himself.
