So now we are in entirely uncharted territory, because let’s face it: human megabrands are a relatively new phenomenon. There’s no rulebook that foresaw any of this. People keep asking—is he going to divest? Is he going to sell his businesses? Is Ivanka going to? But it’s not at all clear what these questions even mean, because their primary businesses are their names. You can’t disentangle Trump the man from Trump the brand; those two entities merged long ago. Every time he sets foot in one of his properties—a golf club, a hotel, a beach club—White House press corps in tow, he is increasing his overall brand value, which allows his company to sell more memberships, rent more rooms, and increase fees.
The logic of how the Trump family sees the relationship between branding and political office was laid bare in the lawsuit Melania Trump launched just before she became First Lady. She demanded $150 million in damages from the company that owns the Daily Mail website for falsely implying she worked in the past as an escort. And she had every right to sue for damages for that. But what was the basis for saying she had lost a staggering $150 million, given that she barely has a business of her own? The core of her legal case was that, as First Lady, she would have built—in the future—a valuable brand “in multiple product categories, each of which could have garnered multimillion-dollar business relationships for a multi-year term during which Plaintiff is one of the most photographed women in the world.” (The Daily Mail settled, apologizing to Trump and paying out an undisclosed sum.)
It’s not unprecedented for first wives to parlay their political profile into a lifestyle brand. Samantha Cameron, wife of David, waited just five months after her husband stepped down as British prime minister before announcing her own “working women” clothing line. But what is striking about Melania’s now-settled lawsuit is that she seemed to be trying to skip the stage of actually launching a serious brand and instead went straight to claiming the money. Moreover those original court filings make plain how the Trumps see public office: as a short-term investment to enormously swell the value of your commercial brand in the long run.
We can also see this with Ivanka, whose products have notoriously been hawked by taxpayer-funded public employees, including her father via Twitter, and his adviser Kellyanne Conway, who went on national television to do what she described as a “commercial,” telling viewers to “Go buy Ivanka’s stuff!” The conflicts tipped into self-parody on April 6, 2017, when, the Associated Press reported, “Ivanka Trump’s company won provisional approval from the Chinese government for three new trademarks, giving it monopoly rights to sell Ivanka brand jewellery, bags and spa services in the world’s second-largest economy.” But that’s not the only thing that happened that day. “That night, the first daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, sat next to the president of China and his wife for a steak and Dover sole dinner at Mar-a-Lago.” A political summit whose details had been arranged by none other than Jared Kushner. Asked about these kinds of conflicts, Ivanka invariably stresses that just as her father has supposedly distanced himself from the Trump Organization by putting it in the hands of his sons (while he still collects the profits), Ivanka has put her company in the hands of “independent trustees”—her husband’s brother and sister (while she still collects the profits). This goes well beyond nepotism; it’s the US government as a for-profit family business.
We know that Trump’s presidency has made the family of brands more valuable because Ivanka’s business reported record sales after Kellyanne Conway made her televised pitch. Mar-a-Lago has already increased its membership fees, to $200,000 a year from $100,000. And why not? Now, for your fee, you might find yourself witnessing a high-stakes conversation about national security over dinner. You might get to hobnob with a visiting head of state. You might even get to witness Trump announcing that he has just launched an air assault on a foreign country. And, of course, you might even get to meet the President himself, and have the chance to quietly influence him. (No public records are kept of who comes and goes from the club, so who knows?) For decades, Trump has been selling the allure of proximity to wealth and power—it is the meaning of his brand. But now he’s able to offer, to his paying customers, the real deal.
Trump’s ownership of Mar-a-Lago is telling in itself. A decade before Trump purchased the property in 1985, the owner of the estate, socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post, had bequeathed it to the US government in the hopes that it could be used as a presidential retreat or a “Winter White House.” But no president used it and it was eventually returned. Long before the 2016 election, Trump had enjoyed boasting about the fact that he lived in a house intended for presidents. Indeed, in retrospect it is as if he was playing at being president for three decades. And now, with the 2016 elections, that fantasy has become a reality—or is it reality that has been swallowed whole by Trump’s fantasy? As with all things Trump, it’s genuinely difficult to tell. Trump may call his Palm Beach estate the “Winter White House” or the “Southern White House,” but it is, of course, no such thing. The White House is a public institution; Mar-a-Lago remains a private, for-profit, members-only club with the proceeds flowing directly to Trump and his family.
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Any president who refused to sell his business would face potential conflicts of interest, since the actions of the US government can impact everything from stock prices to, as we will see in a couple of chapters, the price of oil. But brand-based companies like Trump’s are different beasts entirely. The conflicts of interest are not only tied to specific policies or actions. Rather, the conflicts are omnipresent and continuous, embedded in the mere fact of Trump being president. That’s because the value of lifestyle brands fluctuates wildly depending on the space they occupy in the culture. So anything that increases Donald Trump’s visibility, and the perception of him as all-powerful, actively increases the value of the Trump brand, and therefore increases how much clients will pay to be associated with it—to slap it on their new condo development, say, or, on a smaller scale, to play on his golf courses or buy one of his ties.
And there is no sign that Trump is backing off exploiting that fact to its fullest advantage. According to a New York Times report in April 2017, “Mr. Trump’s enterprise, now run by his two adult sons, has 157 trademark applications pending in 36 countries.”
What Exactly Are the Trump Boys Selling?