Now facing Kamala Harris, Donald Trump has kicked things up a notch. Trump sounds desperate, like a salesman who is losing a sale on a big-ticket item. Trump is wallowing in superlatives.
College classmate Tony Farrell, who had a great career in marketing for The Sharper Image and The Nature Company, then culminating in producing TV infomercials, said the secret of informercial marketing is "to make no small promises." Make big promises. Products aren't merely good; they are stupendous! Trump Steaks, one of Tony's clients from his The Sharper Image days, marketed the product as "The World's Greatest Steaks." The meat was supplied by a subsidiary of Sysco, a national food supplier to schools, hospitals, restaurants, including the ones at Mar-a-Lago, but also grocery stores. Reviews were poor, with people complaining that the meat was good, but wildly overpriced. The package needed to include a bunch of hamburger along with the steaks to get the weight up to an acceptable level. The product quickly failed and was discontinued. At some point the mis-match between marketing sizzle and product reality became too apparent to too many people.They weren't the greatest anything. It was hype.
Trump has moved into the frantic, manic, over-the-top stage in his language. Trump calls Harris "Commie Kamala," "Low-IQ," "really dumb," and "the worst vice president in the history of the country by far." It isn't just bad, "it's a disaster."
Superlatives and catastrophe.
It works on some people all of the time and some people some of the time. There is an audience for Trump's marketing. Second only to political party, White racial animus was the strongest predictor of Trump support in the 2016 election. Americans have made enormous progress in reducing racial prejudice during my lifetime, but old prejudices persist quietly in the background. Trump exploits that. Trump skillfully pushed Harris into re-affirming that she is Black, by gosh, by accusing her of having obscured her true race. Trump tickles the idea that his Black opponent surely must be inferior and unqualified. I'm really smart, Trump says, but she is low-IQ. Really, really, low-IQ. She's really bad, stupendously bad. And stupid.
Make no small promises.
Kamala Harris graduated from college then law school, passed the nation's hardest bar exam, became a prosecutor, an elected DA, the attorney general of California, a U.S. senator, a vice president. It isn't the resume of a low-IQ person. She doesn't sound stupid. She presents like a professional woman. She isn't Sarah Palin. MAGA voters like what Trump says and believe it. They hear on Fox and in conservative media that Kamala Harris is stupid and has a funny laugh, surely someone who benefited from affirmative action. She must have cheated some better-qualified White person. That message is affirmation for Trump's base. Marketing to some of the people all of the time is good business.
But Trump's hyper-drive insult-driven superlative marketing is too much. It reads as hype and dishonest. His campaign advisors -- plus Fox opinion hosts -- are trying to get him to chill out and moderate. Trump cannot or will not dial back. He is a true believer in himself and in making no small promises. He is the greatest, the greatest president ever, better than Lincoln, better than Washington. The best!
Biden -- oops, now Harris -- is the very, very worst.
Trump thought he had the sale wrapped up, and then a competitor stepped in at the last minute. The sale may be slipping away. People sense his desperation.
The final act of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, has a description of a salesman in Trump's position, facing the end of a career:
He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back--that's an earthquake. And then you get a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished.
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3 comments:
Considering Trump’s notorious history of boldfaced lies, especially his racist “birther” lies and claims of a “stolen election,” I can’t imagine how people with any sense at all would believe anything he says. Oh, that’s right – they don’t.
No doubt his sorry excuse for a life will someday be turned into a bombastic melodrama. They can call it, Raging Bullshit.
",A sucker born every minute " !
Speaking of which, I just heard Trump, on. NPR, promise to reduce Consumer Prices by placing a 20% Tariff on every imported good from any Foreign Country; He is so cynical he doesn't care that Consumers pay those tariffs, not the Producers, if he even has a basic understanding of how tariffs work, which is always in doubt, and the really scary part is that a very significant portion of the Electorate believes him.
The enraging part is NPR acting as if he's anything but a congenital compulsive liar, and treating him as legitimate Candidate for the Oval Office.
In order to appear fair and balanced, Republicans expect the media to treat their lies and crackpot conspiracy theories as if they were actual information and to treat their leader as if he were a respectable political leader instead of the dangerous criminal he is. That’s a lot of pressure, especially for a publicly supported media organization. I don’t envy them.
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