PR is one word for it
Nathan Robinson at the Guardian considers Trump’s fraud-skills.
Donald Trump has one particular skill: pretending things are different than they seem. He was never a good businessman, but he was fantastic at playing a good businessman on TV.
Was he? I never saw it, so I don’t know, but from his performances that I have been seeing for the past four years plus a few months, my guess is that he was successful rather than fantastic. I don’t think it’s about his talent so much as it is about the eager willingness of his audience to be impressed. Why that is I don’t think I will ever understand, but I get that it is. The behaviors that make me feel sick – the sadism, the bullying, the shouty stupid ranting – make others feel elated and in love. I find the disconnect depressing.
His coronavirus response has been abysmal, but his public insistence that everything is fine has somehow managed to keep him from losing significant support. Trump’s specialty is PR – spinning bad things rather than doing good things.
Well, yes, but that’s putting it too mildly, and thus too kindly. His specialty is lying and manipulating. His specialty is taking a blowtorch to truth in all directions in order to direct more money and power toward him and away from everyone else. It’s not a kind of winsome fact about him that he’s all talk and no action, it’s a sinister fact about him that he’s a lying thieving murdering sadist who has accrued massive power.
“His coronavirus response has been abysmal, but his public insistence that everything is fine has somehow managed to keep him from losing significant support. ”
No behavior would have lost him the support of those in his thrall. He could do what he’ done or be the opposite.
They are for too vested to quit him even if they wanted to.
Sure, but let’s keep in mind that that’s not everyone who voted for him. It’s not one massive solid lump of people all of whom are in his thrall, it’s a range of people with different cutoff points. There’s probably X amount of people who would never change no matter what, but we don’t know how many are in that X.
I watched the first season of The Apprentice, maybe some of the second? Before they shifted to the celebrity version.
Although Trump had already been flirting with running for President at that point, his politics were pretty vague, so I didn’t have any ideological opinion of him. I had not paid a ton of attention to him generally, but of course we all knew about the bankruptcies and such, so I sort of thought of him as “guy who’s really really good at self-promotion, but not as great at business as he likes to pretend.”
All I really remember thinking about the show then was:
(1) the tasks/challenges were really stupid, and did not test real business schools. I think they actually had the contestants run lemonade stands at one point. (Or ice cream, or whatever.)
(2) They also had this weird insistence on dividing the teams by gender.
(3) Trump’s firing decisions seemed to come out of nowhere. It would be pretty clear who was primarily responsible for the losing team’s poor performance, but then Trump would jump upon some chance comment in the “boardroom” and fire someone else. Reality shows like to surprise viewers a little, but when viewers are left scratching their heads over the decision, and the producers couldn’t even edit the show to justify it a little more….
(4) There was a big controversy (well, in the online reality show discussion world) over the finale to season… 2? The clear winner was a black guy named Randall, but then suddenly Trump starts saying “well, maybe I should hire both of you, what do you think, Randall, co-winners?” I think I had stopped following that season so I only recall this secondhand. But a lot of people felt it was racism that made Trump so anxious to deny the black contestant an unambiguous win.
(1) and (2) were probably production team decisions that Trump had little to do with. Although I’m sure that if a real business person was in Trump’s place, he or she might have insisted that the tasks bear a little more resemblance to real tasks.
I’d love to say that (3) and (4) made me see Trump completely for what he is, but that would be exaggerating I think. I mean, I knew going in that he wasn’t the brilliant wheeler-dealer he pretended to be, but I thought there was a little more calculation behind the image. In fact, even up to his first month in office, I was under the impression that there was some more thought behind his craziness.
OB @2,
Steve Bannon commented that the Lincoln Project would be a real threat to Trump’s re-election chances if they could peel off 4% of Republicans. That’s it, just 4%. The LP folks agree and have cited this target repeatedly.
It’s the consequence of Trump (1) “winning” narrowly in 2016 to begin with; and (2) making little to no effort to reach beyond his 2016 supporters. In poker terms, Trump drew to an inside straight in 2016, got lucky, and won a big pot, and now, like a lot of bad players, he’s repeating that tactic. He could succeed again, of course, but he has very little margin for error.
Trump isn’t a businessman. He’s a real estate speculator. His teams put together deals to take his name, and mostly other people’s money to move property. He has more in common with a house flipper than a titan of industry. Buy it, slap some lipstick and his brand on it, then leverage the next purchase before the creditors for the last deal show up. He has invented nothing, grown no industries, managed no kind of supply chain, or created any products other than his noxious brand of populism. In a real industry, his behavior would have landed him in trouble with his board, rather than creating a successful reality TV model.
Pliny,
I forget where I read it or who wrote it, but more precisely you can break down Trump’s career into stages. There’s the original real estate speculation stage, then the expansion into things like casinos and airlines and a USFL team, then (post-bankruptcy) licensing business, reality tv star, and then more real estate in the form of luxury buildings and golf courses.
He’s burned through multiple infusions of cash: his original stake from his father, his subsequent inheritance, the loans he got from banks dumb enough to keep lending to him, the money he got from investors dumb enough to buy equity in his badly run business, the money from The Apprentice, and then the financing from Deutsche Bank and related sources.
The reality TV things is the only part you can really give him credit for. I mean, I’d give most of the credit to Mark Burnett, but Trump’s publicity whoring made him a big enough name for Burnett to select him, Trump knew enough to say yes, and he was compelling enough television (through the magic of editing) that they made millions togethers.
Screechy, you might like this clip of Penn Jillette describing working with Trump for two seasons of The Apprentice. (I’ve probably linked it here before but it strikes me as insightful)
Thanks. Jillette is right on about how, in a weird way, Trump was ideal for that role precisely because he was arbitrary and capricious and kept viewers guessing what would happen in a way that a competent businessperson wouldn’t. I mean, I eventually got tired of that guessing game and stopped watching, but they still got me for like a season and a half.