Superlatives. The very, very, VERY

 "Make no small promises."

Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary last night. 

In his victory speech he told us the consequences of a Trump victory in November. America would be great. Now it is terrible -- the very worst.

Readers are waking up to news that Trump was less than gracious in victory last night. The consensus of commentary is that Trump appeared more irritated than joyful. He was flanked by Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott, who had dropped out. They took the stand to praise him. Nikki Haley was not joining the coronation.  

Trump is "otherizing" Haley. She isn't part of his team, or even America's team, he says. Trump has been hinting that maybe Haley was not a native-born American qualified to be president -- the birther gambit he used against Obama. She was an "anchor baby" and therefore part of a fraud. He began using her given first name, Nimarata. He took up calling her a "birdbrain" puppet of Democrats. Last night he hinted that he knew dark secrets that she would not want revealed:

“Just a little note to Nikki. She’s not going to win. But if she did, she would be under investigation by those people in 15 minutes, and I could tell you five reasons why already. 

“Not big reasons, little stuff that she doesn’t want to talk about, that she will be under investigation within minutes, and so would Ron [DeSantis] have been, but he decided to get out.”

The bullying nativism may distract Democrats from seeing the power and effectiveness of Trump's salesmanship. Trump follows the core observation of my college classmate Tony Farrell, who has done guest posts here. Farrell had a long, successful career in marketing. He supervised the Trump Steaks account when he was at The Sharper Image. A lode star in marketing on TV infomercials is the command: Make No Small Promises. 

Trump's victory speech in New Hampshire

Rationally, a consumer should be wary of extreme, grandiose superlatives. We have all heard the caution to be wary of a promise that is too good to be true. We need that advice. Humans respond to forceful, decisive certitude. Trump seems genuinely to believe what he is saying, and his certitude is infectious. At minute 10:20 he says he got millions of votes but was cheated out of them in the 2020 election, and then at 11:10:

We're going to have the greatest election success. We're going to turn our country around. If you take a look around the history of our country. If you look at the ten worst presidents in the history of this not-great-country-right-now, it's a country in decline, it's a troubled country, it's a failing country, frankly -- but if you took the 10 worst presidents and put them together -- the 10 worst, the absolutely 10 worst -- I used to say five, remember I used to say five -- they would not have done the damage that Crooked Joe Biden has done to our wonderful country. They would not have done the damage. There's never been anything like it.

Say, are they stupid people? I don't think so, because nobody can cheat that well if they are stupid. Do they hate our country? They must hate our country because there is no other reason that they can be doing the things they do. Take a look. They want to raise our taxes times four. They want to let the Trump tax cuts, the biggest tax cuts in the history of our country, they want them to expire. Your taxes are going to go through the roof. Take a look at regulations, they are throwing regulations, you can't breathe, you can't even breathe with what they're doing. Take a look at our border. There's never been a border like this in the world. Four years ago we had the safest, best border in the United States. . . .

Superlatives. This style persuades some, not all. I cannot imagine a board of directors or hiring committee that would hire Trump for any position of leadership. Not a school district board hiring a principal or superintendent. Not a search committee for a city manager, hospital director, or college president.  Any hiring body would see Trump as an unreliable blowhard and a danger to the institution.

But such a person succeeds in some roles. I reflect on super-salespeople in my former work as a financial advisor. A person like Trump might have an extraordinary -- but likely brief -- career. He would find clients, overpromise, take giant risks in concentrated positions, and then, as we would describe it in the brokerage industry, "blow up his book." Brokerage management is on the lookout for such people, both seeking them and hoping to control them, but wary. Super-salespeople are brilliant and profitable employees for a while, but they are too persuasive. Clients get talked into things they regret, clients lose money, they complain and sue, and they bring down the super-salesman advisor and the managers who were supposed to supervise him. 

Under normal circumstances the 2020 election and aftermath would have been the career-ending finish for super-salesman Trump. But Fox and other conservative media did the equivalent of assuring investors that their account statements were wrong, that the stock prices they see were fake news. Don't believe what you see. Trump retained his base, and indeed consolidated it. 

He talks in superlatives, and he persuades. He will make a sugary, low-nutrition breakfast cereal sound g-r-e-a-t. People know better, but they buy it anyway. It sounds SO great.

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