Way back in February Sean Illing spelled it out for us in Salon.com: “Donald Trump Is a Fraud: Report Confirms the Billionaire’s Presidential Bid Is a Long and Calculated Con Job.”
Illing began his blog by saying, “Everything Trump has done during the campaign is designed to dupe the media into funding his marketing strategy.”
Illing continued: “Donald Trump’s presidential campaign feels whimsical, like a practical joke or publicity tour gone awry. But it turns out that Donald is running a long con. A new report in Politico suggests Trump has been plotting this stuff for years, and he knew exactly what he had to do to succeed.”
It turns out Politico reported two years ago that some “GOP operatives” approached Trump to suggest he run for governor of New York. “To their surprise,” wrote Illing, “he declined but added they would be useful when he ran for president. ‘I’m going to walk away with it and win outright,’ Trump told the group, ‘I’m going to get in and all the polls are going to go crazy. I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me.’”
We can certainly see that his strategy continues to work like a charm.
Illing continued in his February article: ”Trump knew all along that his celebrity and media savvy were sufficient to support his campaign. Although they didn’t believe him, Trump told the Republicans in that room in 2013 that he would dominate the race without spending much on paid advertising.”
Illing reported that Trump himself stated that his not having to spend much on paid advertising is “really about the power of the mass audience.”
Illing went on to talk about what we all know now, that Trump was right:
The ability to control the narrative, to dominate the coverage, is all it takes. Trump’s amorality [italics, mine] coupled with his gift for self-promotion has turned the Republican presidential race on its head. He’s made the race about him, and any time he isn’t the main story, he lurches back into the headlines with an outrageous comment about women or Muslims or Mexicans or disabled people—anything to win the news cycle.…
The biggest take away from the report is that Trump is indeed a professional huckster. And whatever else he is, he’s not stupid. He doesn’t believe half the absurdities he utters on the campaign trail either. As the report makes clear, everything he’s done and said was designed to dupe the media into funding his marketing strategy.
Illing noted then how Trump …
tapped into a vein of resentment in the country, and in a way no serious politician could. And on the other hand, he is free to say whatever he wants, no matter how controversial, because doing so breathes more oxygen into his campaign. Even more advantageous, he’s entered the race at an ideal time. The public—for good reasons—no longer trusts Washington. Trump is a hack who can’t fix anything, but people make bad decisions when they’re anxious or angry, and Trump is offering them an alternative to the status quo. This is what demagogues do, and it usually works.
What Illing is saying about demagogues is that these types of amoral characters rely on people’s prejudices, passions, and impulsive reflexes in a way that is considered manipulative and dangerous.
Fast-forward to August, seven months later, after he’s won the Republican nomination. We can see in hindsight, it happened just as he predicted, for the reasons he predicted: because he knows how to manipulate the media to sell a product. The product in this case, is Trump, always his primary product. A lot of people are even more concerned at the numbers he is attracting. So how hard shall we be on these voters clamoring for him? Well, how hard shall we be on consumers clamoring for Pokémon Go, Twinkies, artificial sweetener, or six-inch heels? These are products shown to be bad for you in the most important way: physical health and safety. Yet their popularity never seems to wane. If Americans are exceptional at anything, it might be how susceptible we are to marketing! But we’re probably no more exceptional in that area than in any other; falling for propaganda (the other word for marketing, especially when it’s politics being marketed) seems to be an ancient and universal human trait.
So what do we do about this Trump character? Is it serious?
Yes, it’s serious when a man can perpetrate such a travesty of democracy and a mockery of citizenship on the American people as Donald Trump is doing. To pretend to run for president of the United States, the highest office in the land, when in fact he is simply to demonstrating his marketing acumen, in which the end result is to show the world how clever he is in being able to dupe everyone that he was ever truly a candidate for president of the United States. Because we don’t think he has any intention to be president nor that he ever has; he simply wants to be the top story in the news, which he has been since his campaign began. How much more disingenuous can a person be? Good job, Donald, you are indeed trump, the card that outdoes all the other hands, the card that can thwart all the rules of the game when in play. And that’s what this card’s namesake has done to the nation’s two-hundred-thirty (more or less)-year-old electoral process itself.
Like we said in in our June 15, 2016, blog, “To Be or Not to Be, That Is the Question,” we believe Trump really doesn’t want to be president of the United States, and in our most recent blog before this one, dated August 1, 2016, “Why ‘The Donald’ is Dangerous and Shouldn’t Be President of the United States, we think he really shouldn’t be. Let’s remember that in 1972, when it came out that Democrat George McGovern’s vice presidential nominee, Thomas Eagleton, had been treated for depression, the party and the presidential candidate decided he was unfit for office and removed him from the ticket. Note please that Eagleton had been treated and was not depressed anymore. Besides which, depression is not seen to be a big danger to others. But in this year’s case, we have something much worse. Someone with an untreated, severe case of narcissistic personality disorder is running for the top government office in the nation, possibly in the world. Recent research indicates that a person with such a condition, particularly when left untreated, can be dangerous in a stressful position of authority. The presidency is nothing if not that.
Illing ended his February blog by stating, “Everything Trump does has to be seen in the broader context of his media-centric strategy. No one should ask if Trump believes what he says; it’s impossible to know. If he does believe something he says, it’s a happy coincidence, because his campaign is an experiment in modern marketing, not an expression of his political worldview.”
What we do know is that the presidency is not a product to be marketed, sold, and profited from; it’s not a position for someone with an irrelevant point to prove—that marketing can do anything. It’s a public office meant to serve the whole country, presiding over all our domestic needs and interests and all our international ones. Anyone only out for himself, no matter what he says, has no business being there. And while we’re at it, we might want to start thinking about the very profession of marketing. Since we want a high moral value in our public officials, how about our business leaders and economic system? In other words, is amorality in commerce a good thing? We might be inclined finally, after this experience, to offer an emphatic no.
For our next blog, we’re going to examine the old saying friendship and business don’t mix. If that’s true, why is it true? What happens in relationships when business is introduced into the mix? Is it business or friendship that tends to cause the relationship to go awry? That’s what we’ll be exploring.
In the meantime, check out our book Political Straight Talk: A Prescription for Healing Our Broken System of Government for the background on why America’s promise—a union of the people, by the people, and for the people, with liberty and justice for all—might still be fulfilled.