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 fa?ade 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