Marketing Opportunity

“He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election. The campaign – for him – was always a marketing opportunity.” That is Michael Cohen’s statement to Congress today regarding Trump. The statement confirms a lot of what most of us already know, mainly that Trump is a racist, liar, cheat and conman, and is worth reading in its entirety, but let’s talk about the marketing statement.

Apparently, as many speculated over the last two years, Trump decided to run for office with no hope of winning but wanted to raise his profile, build his brand and the campaign would serve as his infomercial.

Salesmanship, especially the dishonest kind, is quintessentially American. We’ve been ripping people off since day one.  At our founding, we sold stolen land and stolen people to build up private wealth and it’s been sell, sell, sell ever since. We created modern marketing and public relations in the 20th century to figure out how to get people to buy stuff they don’t want. P.T. Barnum, another master salesman, said that nobody ever lost a dollar underestimating the taste of the American people.

As a people, we’ve always tolerated dishonesty in pursuit of sales, whether it is snake oil or light beer. We watch fake people get inhumanly excited about products in commercials, We’ve been tricked into thinking diamonds were rare, cigarettes were good for us, cars and guns make us free and that you’ll be a healthy, attractive person while wolfing down Big Macs and chugging Coca Cola.

We think it’s normal that our politicians lie to us when they run for office.  We’ve been sold upstanding, competent, family men who were anything but that to run the country for generations.  We believed campaign marketing paid for by billionaires that the candidates really cared about the “little guy”.  We’ve been suckers and nothing attracts a con like a sucker.

Trump took one look at the gold-plated, white power muscle car the Republican party had been building since Nixon and knew he could be the salesman that closed the deal.  We’re conditioned by media to want the pitch, we want to be sold to. It’s why interest in Super Bowl commercials rivals the event itself. We are the undisputed masters of the universe when it comes to selling ourselves bullshit.

Our conman in chief went overboard on the self-promotion and marketing, enlisting the aid of social media companies, data-analytics firms, psychographic targeters and foreign spies to bamboozle the American public with a shock and awe mindfuck sales campaign that continues to this very day trying to convince us that a mobbed up, draft dodging, lying cheat who has destroyed everything he’s ever touched is somehow fit to continue sitting in the Oval Office.

We need to quit buying it.

The Man Who Sold The World – Nirvana