In the face of his total lack of government experience, Trump sold himself to voters with a somewhat novel two-pronged pitch. First: I’m so rich that I don’t need to be bought off. And second: You can trust me to fix this corrupt system because I know it from the inside—I gamed it as a businessman, I bought politicians, I dodged taxes, I outsourced production. So who better than me and my equally rich friends to drain the swamp?
Not surprisingly, something else has occurred. Trump and his cabinet of former executives are remaking government at a startling pace to serve the interests of their own businesses, their former businesses, and their tax bracket as a whole. Within hours of taking office, Trump called for a massive tax cut, which would see corporations pay just 15 percent (down from 35 percent), and pledged to slash regulations by 75 percent. His tax plan includes a range of other breaks and loopholes for very wealthy people like the ones inhabiting his cabinet (not to mention himself). He appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to head up a “swat team” stacked with corporate executives who have been tasked with finding new regulations to eliminate, new programs to privatize, and new ways to make the US government “run like a great American company.” (According to an analysis by Public Citizen, Trump met with at least 190 corporate executives in less than three months in office—before announcing that visitor logs would no longer be made public). Pushed on what the administration had accomplished of substance in its first months, budget director Mick Mulvaney cited Trump’s hail of executive orders and stressed this: “Most of these are laws and regulations getting rid of other laws. Regulations getting rid of other regulations.”
That they are. Trump and his team are set to detonate programs that protect children from environmental toxins, have told gas companies they no longer need to report all of the powerful greenhouse gases they are spewing, and are pushing dozens and dozens of measures along the same lines. This is, in short, a great unmaking. Which is why Trump and his appointees are laughing at the feeble objections over conflicts of interest—the whole thing is a conflict of interest. That’s the point.
And for no one more than Donald Trump, a man who has merged so completely with his corporate brand that he is clearly unable to tell where one stops and the other begins. One of the most remarkable aspects of the Trump presidency so far is the emergence of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s personal resort in Palm Beach, as a carnivalesque, members-only, all-for-profit “Winter White House” (it was even briefly advertised as such on state department websites). One club member told the New York Times that going to Mar-a-Lago was like “going to Disneyland and knowing Mickey Mouse will be there all day long”—only in this exercise in full-contact branding, it’s not Disneyland but Americaland, and the President of the United States is Mickey Mouse.
The Ultimate Brand Bully
When I read that quote, I realized that if I was going to try to understand this presidency, I’d have to do something I’d resisted for a long time: delve back into the world of corporate marketing and branding that was the subject of my first book, No Logo.
The book focused on a key moment in corporate history—when behemoths such as Nike and Apple stopped thinking of themselves primarily as companies that make physical products, and started thinking of themselves first and foremost as manufacturers of brands. It was in the branding—which manufactured a sense of tribal identity—that they believed their fortunes lay. Forget factories. Forget needing to maintain a huge workforce. Once they realized that their biggest profits flowed from manufacturing an image, these “hollow brands” came to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter who made their products or how little they were paid. They left that to the contractors—a development with devastating repercussions for workers at home and abroad, and one that was also fueling a new wave of anticorporate resistance.
Researching No Logo had required four years of total immersion in branded culture—four years of watching and rewatching Super Bowl ads, scouring Advertising Age for the latest innovations in corporate synergy, reading soul-destroying business books on how to get in touch with your personal brand values, making excursions to Niketowns, visiting Asian sweatshops, going to monster malls, to branded towns, heading out on nighttime billboard raids with ad-busters and culture jammers.
Some of it was fun—I’m far from immune to the allure of good marketing. But by the end, it was as if I had passed some kind of tolerance threshold and developed a condition close to a brand allergy. If Starbucks had come up with a new way to “unbrand” their stores, or Victoria’s Secret had appropriated Indigenous headdresses on the runway, I didn’t want to write about it—I had moved on and left that rapacious world behind. The trouble is, to understand Trump you really have to understand the world that made him what he is, and that, to a very large extent, is the world of branding. He reflects all the worst trends I wrote about in No Logo, from shrugging off responsibility for the workers who make your products via a web of often abusive contractors to the insatiable colonial need to mark every available space with your name. Which is why I decided to delve back into that glossy world to see what it could tell us about how Donald Trump rose to the world’s most powerful job, and maybe even what it was saying about the state of politics more broadly.
Transcending the World of Things
The rise of the Superbrands, like the one Trump built around his brash persona, has its roots in a single, seemingly innocuous idea developed by management theorists in the mid-1980s: that to be successful, corporations must primarily produce brands as opposed to products.
Until that time, although it was understood in the corporate world that bolstering one’s brand name through advertising was important, the primary concern of every solid manufacturer was the production of goods. As a 1938 editorial in Fortune magazine put it,“the basic and irreversible function of an industrial economy is the making of things…It is in the factory and on the land and under the land that purchasing power originates.”