No Is Not Enough Page 5

  I didn’t foresee branding culture going this far when I started writing about it twenty years ago. But I’m also not surprised. Back then, I saw branding as a colonial process: it seeks to absorb ever more space and real estate and create a self-enclosed bubble. What’s extraordinary about Donald Trump’s presidency is that now we are all inside the Trump branded world, whether we want to be or not. We have all become extras in his for-profit reality TV show, which has expanded to swallow the most powerful government in the world.

  Is there any escape? The essential immorality of Trump’s brand does present unique barriers to holding this administration accountable. And yet there is hope. In fact, Trump’s animating life force—the quest for money—may actually make him more vulnerable than any president before.

  Jam the Trump Brand

  Back when I published No Logo, we used to call it “culture jamming,” and the trick was always the same: identify the big bold idea a company is selling and then expose the dirty reality behind the shine. The ability of consumers and activists to impact the behavior of a commercial brand has been demonstrated many times, most recently by the successful campaign to push Bill O’Reilly off the air at Fox News, following revelations that he and his employer had paid out $13 million to settle sexual harassment allegations (without admission of guilt).

  Realizing that there was no shaming the O’Reilly brand, Color of Change, a racial justice organization, alongside several women’s groups, took a backdoor approach: they went after the show’s advertisers, informing them that they were now considered accomplices in what seemed to be a long-term strategy of buying women’s silence. The advertisers heard the same from thousands of customers, online and off, and they began fleeing from the show in droves. Within less than three weeks of the settlement revelations breaking in the New York Times, and despite having the highest rated show on US cable news, O’Reilly was off the air (though with a golden handshake reportedly worth as much as $25 million).

  The campaign showed that any brand can be jammed, even one as defiantly amoral as Trump’s—you just need to understand its weak points.

  Since Trump’s personal brand is being “the boss” who does what he wants, one way to mess with it is to make him look like a puppet. It doesn’t really matter who is yanking the strings. Once they’re exposed, Trump’s carefully nurtured image begins to slip. And this tactic clearly works: Trump was driven so mad by the persistent jokes about #PresidentBannon that he took to Twitter to proclaim himself the supreme decider, and the status of his once all-powerful chief strategist seemed to rapidly decline.

  Since the Trump brand is all about having bags and bags of money, the other way to jam it is to make him less rich. And as with the O’Reilly strategy, the best way to do that is by sending his branding empire into crisis. #GrabYourWallet, the clearinghouse for boycotts of Trump’s web of brands, has been on this since before Trump was elected, and has successfully helped to pressure several chains to drop various Trump brands.

  In the grand scheme of Trump’s branding empire, these are dents. The main source of revenue for the Trump Organization is selling and renting office and condo units and leasing Trump’s name to real estate companies around the world. Trump was clearly betting that being president would drive up the price. But what if he is proven wrong? What if he starts losing commercial renters because they are coming under pressure for their association with his brand (several boycott campaigns like this are already under way)? And what if developers come under so much public pressure that they decide having Trump’s name on their façade is actually costing them revenue? Already, in New York City, tenants of Trump Place demanded that their building manager take the Trump name off their home. As one resident said, she was tired of feeling “disgust” each time she walked into her building. The manager complied and Trump’s name was removed.

  And when the Trump sons went to Vancouver to celebrate the opening of the latest Trump temple, they were met with protests and boycotts from local politicians. If these kinds of protests spread, more developers could decide to de-Trump themselves. And it’s a fair bet that if his golden name starts disappearing off giant phallic symbols from Vancouver to Manila, Trump would not take it well, nor would his sons, who are reportedly already worried about the damage that senior advisors like Steve Bannon may have done to the family name.

  In a parallel tactic, when the White House closed down its call-in comment lines in January 2017, one group—whitehouseinc.org—suggested voters phone Trump hotels and resorts and tell whoever answered that they were upset about the president’s plans to take away their health insurance, or any other policy grievances they had. It was a smart tactic. Tens of thousands reportedly made the calls, and one month later the White House reopened the lines.

  If any of this seems unfair, consider this: The whole reason we expect politicians to divest their financial holdings, or put them in a real blind trust, is that having active business holdings while serving in office creates all kinds of opportunities for conflicts of interest and backdoor influence. Trump has chosen not to divest. His adviser-daughter has made the same choice. Which is why it’s perfectly legitimate to use those choices to try to influence the hell out of them.

  If his branding empire loses enough revenue, and his personal boss image is sufficiently battered, Trump might just course-correct on some of his more inflammatory policies. At the very least, jamming his central pitch to voters—“trust me, I’m a successful billionaire”—will hurt his chances in 2020.

  But before we get there, we are all going to be subjected to a lot more of the Trump show.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE MAR-A-LAGO HUNGER GAMES

  Ronald Reagan was once asked what it was like to be president after being an actor, and he reportedly said, “How can a president not be an actor?” You can imagine Trump thinking the same thing about being a reality TV star.

  Trump’s mastery of the genre was pivotal in the construction of his branded empire and it was essential to his successful run for president. And now Trump is using those same skills he learned on The Apprentice—the belief that he can cut, edit, and reshape reality to fit a largely pre-scripted, self-aggrandizing outcome—to transform not just the White House, but large parts of the world.

  The King of Live-Action Trickle-Down

  The colonization of network television by reality TV at the turn of the millennium happened at a speed that few could have predicted. In very short order, North Americans went from deriving entertainment from scripted shows with the same recurring characters and dramas week after week, season after season, to watching seemingly unscripted shows where the drama came from people’s willingness to eject one another from whatever simulation of reality happened to be on display. Tens of millions were glued to their sets as participants were voted off the island on Survivor, voted out of the mansion on The Bachelor—and, eventually, fired by Donald Trump.

  The timing makes sense. The first season of Survivor—so wildly successful that it spawned an army of imitators—was in 2000. That was two decades after the “free-market revolution” had been kicked into high gear by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, with its veneration of greed, individualism, and competition as the governing principles of society. It was now possible to peddle as mass entertainment the act of watching people turn on each other for a pot of gold.

  The whole genre—the alliances, the backstabbing, the one person left standing—was always a kind of capitalist burlesque. Before The Apprentice, however, there was at least the pretext that it was about something else: how to survive in the wilderness, how to catch a husband, how to be a housemate. With Donald Trump’s arrival, the veneer was gone. The Apprentice was explicitly about the race to survive in the cutthroat “jungle” of late capitalism.

  The first episode began with a shot of a homeless person sleeping rough on the street—a loser, in other words. Then the camera cut to Trump in his limo, living the dream—the ultimate winner. The message was
unmistakable: you can be the homeless guy, or you can be Trump. That was the whole sadistic drama of the show—play your cards right and be the one lucky winner, or suffer the abject humiliation of being berated and then fired by the boss. It was quite a cultural feat: after decades of mass layoffs, declining living standards, and the normalization of extremely precarious employment, Mark Burnett and Donald Trump delivered the coup de grâce: they turned the act of firing people into mass entertainment.

  Life’s a Bitch

  Every week, to millions of viewers, The Apprentice delivered the central sales pitch of free-market theory, telling viewers that by unleashing your most selfish and ruthless side, you are actually a hero—creating jobs and fueling growth. Don’t be nice, be a killer. That’s how you help the economy and, more importantly, yourself.

  In later seasons, the underlying cruelty of the show grew even more sadistic. The winning team lived in a luxurious mansion—drinking champagne in inflatable pool loungers, zipping off in limos to meet celebrities. The losing team was deported to tents in the backyard, nicknamed “Trump trailer park.”

  The tent-dwellers, whom Trump gleefully deemed the “have-nots,” didn’t have electricity, ate off paper plates, and slept to the sounds of howling dogs. They would peek through a gap in the hedge to see what decadent wonders the “haves” were enjoying. In other words, Trump and Burnett deliberately created a microcosm of the very real and ever-widening inequalities outside the show, the same injustices that have enraged many Trump voters—but they played those inequalities for kicks, turning them into a spectator sport. (There was a slight Hunger Games quality to it, though hemmed in by network television restrictions on non-simulated violence.) On one show, Trump told the tent team that “life’s a bitch,” so they’d better do everything possible to step over the losers and become a winner like him.

  What’s interesting about this particular piece of televised class warfare, which aired in 2007, is that the pretense sold to a previous generation—capitalism was going to create the best of all possible worlds—is completely absent. No: this is a system that generates a few big winners and hordes of losers, so you’d better make damn sure you are on the winning team.

  This reflects the fact that, for well over a decade now, the ideological and intellectual side of the neoliberal project has been in severe crisis. In 2016, Credit Suisse estimated that there is roughly $256 trillion in total global wealth—with a staggeringly unequal distribution: “While the bottom half collectively own less than 1 percent of total wealth, the wealthiest top 10 percent own 89 percent of all global assets.” Which is why there just aren’t many serious people left who are willing to argue, with a straight face, that giving more to the wealthy is the best way to help the poor. Trump’s pitch has always been different. From the start, it was: I will turn you into a winner—and together we can crush the losers.

  In a Real-World Nightmare, Dreams Sell

  It’s worth remembering that Trump’s breakthrough to national celebrity status came not via a real estate deal, but a book about making real estate deals. The Art of the Deal, marketed as holding the secrets to fabulous financial wealth, was published in 1987—the peak of the Reagan era. It was followed up over the years with crasser variations on the same theme: Think Like a Billionaire, Think Big and Kick Ass, Trump 101, and How to Get Rich.

  Trump first started selling the notion that he held the ticket to joining the top one percent of income earners at the precise moment when many of the ladders that provided social mobility between classes—like free quality public education—were being kicked away, and just as the social safety net was being shredded. All of this meant that the drive to magically strike it rich, to win big, to make it to that safe economic stratum, became increasingly frantic.

  Trump, who was born wealthy, expertly profited off that desperation across many platforms, but most infamously through Trump University. In one ad for the scandal-plagued and now-defunct “university” (actually a series of dodgy seminars in hotel meeting rooms), Trump declared, “I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you.”

  And then there were the casinos, a large chunk of Trump’s US real estate portfolio. The dream at the center of the casino economy is not so different from the dream for sale at Trump University or in How to Get Rich: you may be on the verge of personal bankruptcy today, but if you (literally) play your cards right, you could be living large by morning.

  This is central to how Trump built his brand and amassed his wealth—by selling the promise that “you too could be Donald Trump”—at a time when life was becoming so much more precarious if you weren’t in the richest one percent. He then turned around and used that very same pitch to voters—that he would make America a country of winners again—exploiting those deep economic anxieties and using all the reality-simulation skills that he had picked up from years at the helm of a top-rated TV show. After decades of hawking how-to-get-rich manuals, Donald Trump understands exactly how little needs to be behind the promise—whether on renegotiating trade deals or bringing back manufacturing—if the desperation is great enough.

  Reveling in the Fake on the Road to the White House

  Well before Trump’s rise, elections had already crossed over into ratings-driven infotainment on cable news. What Trump did was to exponentially increase the entertainment factor, and therefore the ratings. As a veteran of the form, he understood that if elections had become a form of reality TV, then the best contestant (which is not the same thing as the best candidate) would win. Maybe they wouldn’t win the final vote, but they would at least win wall-to-wall coverage, which from a branding perspective is still winning. As Trump said when he was contemplating a presidential run in 2000 (he decided against it): “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”

  Since the election, we’ve heard a few mea culpas from media executives acknowledging that they helped Trump’s electoral rise by giving him such an outsized portion of their coverage. And that’s true, they helped enormously, but the hand-wringing doesn’t go nearly far enough. They are also responsible because the biggest gift to Trump was not just airtime but the entire infotainment model of covering elections, which endlessly plays up interpersonal dramas between the candidates while largely abandoning the traditional journalistic task of delving into policy specifics and explaining how different candidates’ positions on issues such as health care and regulatory reform will play out in voters’ lives.

  The Tyndall Report found that, through the entire election, the three major nightly network news shows combined spent a total of just 32 minutes on “issues coverage”—down from an already paltry 220 minutes in the 2008 election. The rest was the reality show of who said what about whom, and who was leading which poll where. For millions of viewers, the result was highly entertaining. (Which is likely why French media followed a markedly similar formula to cover its high-stakes 2017 elections.)

  This is worth underlining: Trump didn’t create the problem—he exploited it. And because he understood the conventions of fake reality better than anyone, he took the game to a whole new level.

  Fake Fights, Real Stakes

  Trump didn’t just bring reality TV expertise to electoral politics—he mashed that up with another blockbuster entertainment genre that is also based on a cartoonishly fake performance of reality: professional wrestling. It’s hard to overstate Trump’s fascination with wrestling. He has performed as himself (the ultrarich boss) in World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) appearances at least eight times, enough to earn him a place in the WWE Hall of Fame. In a “Battle of the Billionaires,” he pretended to pound wrestling kingpin Vince McMahon and then celebrated victory by publicly shaving McMahon’s head in front of the cheering throngs. He also dropped thousands of dollars in cash into the audience of screaming fans. Now, he has appointed the former CEO of WWE, Linda McMahon (wife of Vince), to his cabinet as head of the Small Business Administration,
a detail that has largely been lost amidst the daily deluge.

  As with The Apprentice, Trump’s side career in pro wrestling exposed and endeared him to a massive audience—in stadiums, on TV, and online. Pro wrestling might be largely invisible as a cultural force to most liberal voters, but WWE generates close to a billion dollars in annual revenue. And Trump did more than pick up votes from this experience—he also picked up tips.

  As Matt Taibbi pointed out in Rolling Stone, Trump’s entire campaign had a distinctly WWE quality. His carefully nurtured feuds with other candidates were pure pro wrestling, especially the way he handed out insulting nicknames (“Little Marco,” “Lyin’ Ted”). And most wrestling-like of all was the way Trump played ringmaster at his rallies, complete with over-the-top insult-chants (“Lock her up!” “Killary”) and directing the crowd’s rage at the arena’s designated villains: journalists and demonstrators. Outsiders would emerge from these events shaken, not sure what had just happened. What happened is that they had just been to a bizarre cross between a pro-wrestling match and a white supremacist rally.