Donald Trump seems to be riding high. But the right anti-Trump message is finally getting out.
I’ll go out on a limb and say we’re at Peak Trump* here. There’s no real sign of it yet in the polls, and he may yet get a bounce out of the unpopular GOP establishment taking the gloves off against him. Even if Saturday’s voting didn’t go as well for Trump as Super Tuesday, none of his Republican rivals has any obvious path to the nomination. So it’s still possible that the GOP will stumble its way to a Trump candidacy in the fall.
Pundits have been predicting the end of Trump from the moment he announced, and so far all of them have been wrong. But I have a simple reason for believing that the threat of President Trump is finally receding: The right anti-Trump message has emerged and is starting to catch on.
The bad boyfriend. Up until now, arguing with Trump supporters has been like telling your 17-year-old daughter that her 29-year-old boyfriend is no good for her: It’s obvious to you, but everything you say just reinforces the me-and-him-against-the-world mystique that has been driving the relationship from the beginning.
So it didn’t work to laugh at the sheer absurdity of President Trump. Pointing out that he was violating all standards of political decorum — or that his facts were wrong and his proposals nonsensical — didn’t work. Being offended on behalf of Mexicans or Muslims or blacks or Jews or the disabled or Megyn Kelly didn’t work. His target supporters don’t identify with any of those groups, and Trump-supporting women probably think Kelly is a little too smart and pretty and full of herself.
Trump supporters are mostly white straight Christians — many (but not all) working class or less educated — who feel like all the trends are running against them and nobody will speak up for them. The fact that the same people who look down on them disapprove of Trump, and that Trump hasn’t been afraid to piss off all those other groups (and didn’t apologize when he was condemned for it) — that just made his supporters love him more.
You know what finally gets through to the 17-year-old? Meeting her boyfriend’s previous three teen-age girlfriends, the ones he dumped when they got pregnant. They look just like her — or at least they used to, before the single-mom lifestyle started to drag them down. Realizing that he told them all the things he’s telling her … that starts to mean something.
And that’s the message that’s emerging: Not that Trump is crude (which he is) or racist (which he is) or a proto-fascist (which he is) or unprepared for the presidency (which he is) or any of that. But he’s a con-man, and he hasn’t been conning Mexicans or Muslims or Megyn Kelly (who is too smart to fall for his bullshit). No, his career is all about conning the kind of people who support him now.
The Trump University scam. An article in Time describes the victims of his Trump University scam (who are now suing him) like this:
They seem to be middle-class or lower-middle-class people anxious about their financial situations and aspiring to do better. In other words, they are the exact group that Trump the candidate is trying to appeal to. … [Trump University] shortchanged thousands of vulnerable consumers, a large portion of whom were elderly, targeted with messages that Trump University was their ticket to avoiding spending their final years working as greeters at their local Walmart.
Trump U raked in $40 million ($5 million of which went straight to Trump) by promising that Trump would handpick mentors (“terrific people, terrific brains … the best of the best”) who would teach his “secrets” of how to make quick money in real estate. Under Trump’s guidance, you’d turn fast profits on deals that wouldn’t expose you to any risk, because somebody else would finance them. (You know: the same way Mexico is going to pay for that wall.)
In fact, the instructors had no real estate experience, had never met Trump, and their training was in how to up-sell students into ever-more-expensive courses: from free afternoon presentations to expensive weekend workshops and then to even more expensive mentorships — none of which would lead to any easy real-estate scores. Trump’s secret to gaining limitless wealth was always just over the horizon, in the next course.
the playbook [for Trump U instructors] spells out how that [weekend] session was meant to up-sell those $1,495 attendees into mentorship programs costing $9,995 to $34,995. It even uses the term “set the hook” to describe the process of luring people at the free preview session to take the three-day $1,495 course. Once their quarry was on the hook for $1,495, the message to be hammered home beginning on the second day of that program was that three days wasn’t nearly enough time to get the students out there making Trump-like deals. Only the more expensive mentorships could do that.
As in his campaign, Trump’s alleged wealth was part of the con: He didn’t need your money; he was going to give Trump U’s profits to charity. But he didn’t. (CNN also can’t figure out what happened to the money Trump supposedly raised for veterans’ charities.)
The Tampa scam. If Trump U were a unique example, Trump’s attempts to explain it away might be believable. But there’s also Trump Tower Tampa, the glorious-but-imaginary condo project pictured to the right. TTT bilked a bunch of middle-class and upper-middle-class Floridians out of their deposits –including a number of retirees who have no way to make that money back. According to Trump, the building was going to be
so spectacular that it will redefine both Tampa’s skyline and the market’s expectations of luxury.
Except he never built it. In fact, he was never going to build it. All he invested in the project was his name, which he licensed to the developers. When the project went bust in the Florida real estate crash — isn’t a real estate genius like Trump supposed to foresee things like that? — he walked away with his licensing fees ($3 million and a lawsuit that claimed he should get another million) and lost nothing.
But his insulation from any possible loss wasn’t revealed to the buyers before they signed their contracts. Quite the opposite.
At a gala reception attended by 600 dignitaries and well-heeled guests, Trump continued to give the impression that he was actively involved in the project. He had a “substantial stake,” he told reporters, and would have increased it but for the fact that the tower was selling so well.
When the project went bankrupt without having built a single condo, the big losers were the people who had trusted the Trump name enough to put down deposits. Jay Magner, the owner of a dollar store, says:
I lost $130,000. I didn’t know people could take your money and not build the building.
Jay McLaughlin, a physical therapist from Connecticut, also lost his money:
The main reason we went into this was Trump. We had no idea he was just putting his name on it and not backing it financially.
The Baja scam. The same story played out with the Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico, south of Tijuana. It was supposed to be a luxury resort with a view of the Pacific. Trump licensed his name to the project, and marketed it as if the whole idea had been his to start with. With his help, the developers collected millions in deposits, mostly from Californians. But when it went bust, Trump told a different story to the LA Times:
Trump told The Times that the developers were to blame, saying he merely licensed his name to the 525-unit oceanfront project and was not involved in building it.
Maybe the condo buyers would have wanted to know that fact before they plunked down their money. And those blameworthy developers — shouldn’t a real estate genius like Trump be vetting those guys? Isn’t that precisely the kind of thing the Californians dreaming about their Trump oceanfront condos were trusting him to do?
Do you think he told them that he knew nothing about the developers other than the fact that they paid him money? Or did he claim that they too were “terrific people, terrific brains … the best of the best”?
And you know how Trump claims he never settles lawsuits? He settled that one. Lawyers for his victims said they were “very pleased with the outcome”.
There is no you-and-Trump, except in your mind. That’s the message that is eventually going to get through to Trump’s supporters: It’s not you-and-him against the world. In reality, there is no you-and-him against the illegal immigrants who want to steal your job, against the Muslim terrorists who want to kill you, against the Republican establishment that’s been selling you out, or against the politically correct liberals who keep calling you a bigot. It’s not even you-and-him against the Megyn Kellys who wouldn’t go out with you in high school, or who got to be cheerleaders when you didn’t.
That 50-foot wall between us and Mexico, or the trade deal that will bring all those jobs back from China, or the deportation force that will round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and send them back to Mexico — those are like the luxury condos in Tampa and Baja, or the real estate profits that Trump U graduates were supposed to start making. They’re fantasies he dangles that will never manifest in reality. Afterwards, when you remember how few details he gave you and how quickly he changed the subject whenever anybody tried to get those details, you’ll wonder why you ever believed in them.
That’s how it is when you get conned.
You-and-him is a fantasy he’s happy to let you believe in until he gets what he wants. Then he’ll be on to his next scam, and the marks in that scam will look a lot like you — just like the marks in his previous scams look a lot like you.
The wrong arguments. The stories of Trump’s previous cons have been out there for a while, but they’re only beginning to get the attention they deserve. Up until recently, Trump’s rivals had been ignoring him while they maneuvered towards a 1-on-1 match-up they believed they’d win, while his critics had focused on his apparent political weaknesses — his basic ignorance of anything related to public policy, his loose relationship with the facts, his conservative apostasy, his bigotry, and his un-presidential temperament.
What those critics didn’t appreciate was that Trump’s supporters share a lot of those weaknesses. Denigrating Trump also denigrated a lot of his target audience, and bound them closer to him. If he’s stupid, then they’re stupid — and they’re sick of being called stupid.
Even less effective were the articles written by people who are afraid of Trump. Trump’s target audience are people who feel small and ignored. But if Trump inspires fear, then identifying with Trump lets them experience the thrill that people are afraid of them. What could be more appealing?
Donald Drumpf. But now critics are starting to realize that you have to take out Trump’s apparent strengths. That’s the essence of John Oliver’s amazing takedown. Oliver shows clips of Trump fans enthusing about their hero: He tells it like it is. He says what he means. He’s telling the truth. He’s funding his own campaign. He’s strong and bold. He’s a great businessman.
And then Oliver systematically pops all those bubbles. The Donald Trump we think we know is the “mascot” for the Trump brand, which is a triumph of marketing and image-making over reality.
Oliver reviews the scams I detailed above, and closes by exploding the hype of the Trump brand: It’s not even really his family’s name. Generations ago, an ancestor changed it from Drumpf, which Oliver describes as “the sound made when a morbidly obese pigeon flies into the window of a foreclosed Old Navy.”
Drumpf is much more reflective of who he actually is.
So if you are thinking of voting for Donald Trump, the charismatic guy promising to make America great again, stop and take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you just met a guy named Donald Drumpf, a litigious serial liar with a string of broken business ventures and the support of a former Klan leader who he can’t decide whether or not to condemn.
Would you think that he would make a good president, or is the spell now somewhat broken? And that is why tonight, I am asking America to make Donald Drumpf again.
Oliver has acquired the web site donaldjdrumpf.com, where you can buy this attractive hat.
Even Romney. Mitt Romney has always been a little tone-deaf, and I doubt Donald was quaking with fear when Mitt announced he would speak out. But even his unprecedented denunciation of Trump (skip the first 2:30 of the video, or just read the transcript) — when was the last time a party’s most recent nominee publicly denounced its current front-runner in such vitriolic terms? — eventually found the right note:
But you say, wait, wait, wait, isn’t he a huge business success? Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about? No, he isn’t and no he doesn’t.
Look, his bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men and women who work for them. He inherited his business, he didn’t create it. And whatever happened to Trump Airlines? How about Trump University? And then there’s Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks and Trump Mortgage. A business genius he is not.
… I predict that despite his promise to do so, first made over a year ago, that he will never ever release his tax returns. Never — not the returns under audit; not even the returns that are no longer being audited. He has too much to hide.
… Here’s what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the members of the American public for suckers. He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.
I’ll add this to Romney’s point about Drumpf’s taxes: He won’t release them because they’ll prove he’s not as rich as he says he is. That’s part of the scam too.
Suckers. The right response to a Trump supporter isn’t to show fear or get angry or paternalistically explain what the facts actually are or how the world really works. The right response is pity: You poor sucker.
Identifying with Donald Trump isn’t making his fans look strong. It’s showing everybody just how weak and foolish they are. This obvious flim-flam man has taken advantage of their insecurities, and is conning them the way he has conned so many people like them in the past.
Those poor suckers. They think Trump is standing up for them. But nobody is laughing at them harder than he is.
* While doing the final edit on this post, I discovered George Will is also talking about “Peak Trump“. Given Will’s record as a seer, that gave me a moment of doubt. But I’m sticking with my prediction.
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Comments
But Doug, if Trump is a con artist, doesn’t plaque #188 (see link) make the Clintons likewise confidence people? Is there a goose / gander argument here?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Hampshire_historical_markers_(176–200)#188._Historic_Handshake
You lost me. A handshake 21 years ago between Hillary’s husband and a rival didn’t lead to an identifiable accomplishment. I’m not seeing the deep significance.
In Claremont, New Hampshire
Clinton and Gingrich pledged to
Put together a blue ribbon panel
To contain, regulate, and impede
Campaign finance from special interests.
Instead both men have become incredibly
Rich from special interest monies, and our
Republic has been supplanted by an Oligarchy.
Bill Clinton would not be a con artist
If this had been the pledge:
“In a heartbeat…
I am going to step aside,
(But not before sending all
The jobs to slave laborers),
And allow oligarchy in our
Beloved Republic. I will become
wealthy in the process.”
But that was not his pledge.
So was Bill Clinton
a con artist?
By extension, is Hillary?
And can we discard Sanders
Who seems sincere in his
Intention to make and KEEP
The Claremont pledge?
Is he also a con artist?
So here’s a follow-up article from the NYT a year later: “Since last June, Congress has put in place new restrictions on lobbyists. But any meeting of the minds on campaign finance regulation evaporated quickly last summer after Mr. Clinton publicly named two appointees to the commission and suggested how it should be structured. That prompted Mr. Gingrich’s aides to charge that the President had breached an understanding to work out details in private, and the two sides have sporadically traded blame ever since.”
So it sounds like Clinton attempted to proceed and got no cooperation.
This sounds like an enormous blunder of negotiations by two masters of the craft. Wonder why such a silly mistake. Public humiliation. An impasse. Never the less, I am conceding the point to you. Negotiations fell apart. The item was shelved. I only request one thing in return. And don’t go agnostic on me. Two questions, actually. One: Were they told this was how to handle it? Two: Is it OK to go ahead and call the ones who instructed them, “King George?”
you do realize that in competitions, the opponents give a classic handshake. Are you calling tennis athletes “confidence” people? Or business rivals? or political leaders?
Your example looks like a historical moment that was commemorated. But I don’t see how a handshake could be that mysterious. (On the point of being absurd – was it a secret masonic handshake that confirmed that lizard people will start taking over the government because the US is the greatest, “bestest”, hugest, “successfullest” country in all time, space, and matter?)
Let’s be honest. We all recognize what a con requires… a hustler, an uninformed sucker, and a transfer of wealth based on promises that never had a reasonable chance of being realized.
And Trump isn’t even that good a con-man. His cons tend to be blow up spectacularly. A better example of a con-man who got away with it is George Bush Jr.
“Trump-supporting women probably think Kelly is a little too smart and pretty and full of herself.”
Doug, I expect better of you. This statement reinforces misogynistic stereotypes of women as mean girls, and assumes that “Trump-supporting women” (really?) don’t have the same economic and social complaints that Trump-supporting men do, but are easily sidetracked by a girl who’s prettier than they and therefore targetable. Shame.
But what needs explaining is why they don’t take offense at his misogyny.
I expect the answer is a more nuanced than jealousy over Kelly’s attractiveness. If one already distrusts the mainstream media, maybe the media is just lying again, making a big deal over nothing. (Keeping in mind that most people don’t watch the debates.) To an extent if one is invested in someone enough, it’s easier to kinda ignore some problems. And our cultural sexism means that a certain level of sexist behavior is simply invisible; they can be viewed as neutral insults when they aren’t.
Everytime I’ve seen a picture of Megan Kelly smiling, I’ve bern struck by how mean her smile looks.
Beautifully rendered! Drumpf will finally be outed, especially if more thoughtful posts like yours are circulated. Thank you!
It’s very hard to get people out of a con once they’re emotionally invested in it, but you can certainly warn everyone else away. That’s consistent with the recent data that late-deciders are trending away from Trump.
It seems to be a very close call whether enough people are already locked into the cult to win him the nomination, given the party’s inability to settle on a consensus alternative so far, and the likely need to change party rules if there’s to be a contested convention.
You currently need a majority of delegates in at least 8 states to be placed in nomination, and it remains to be seen whether anyone can reach that threshold other than Trump and Cruz. Moreover, the GOP’s “Rule 40(b)” does seem to specify 8 “states,” unless they can convince some parliamentarian to rule that it merely requires 8 “delegations.” In that case, maybe “the establishment” can coax Guam or American Samoa into helping them out. And two states, Wyoming and North Dakota, are deliberately planning to remain uncommitted.
This may be the year political junkies get to witness some of the old-fashioned convention horse-trading they claim to adore so much. As to what diehard Trump voters will think of all that… I imagine plenty of blood vessels will be burst.
Conventions can always change their rules. That looks bad, but if it neither Trump nor Cruz can put together a majority, they’ll have to do something.
Won’t hurt Trump much – his followers are believers like any religion collects. Facts mean nothing to them.
Well while I hope your right I think your wrong.
The Republican Party establishment including Romney along with the NY Times are more like one of those boot camps desperate parents send their wayward kids to. We are going to yell at you and berate you until you see the light and only then can you return to being a good republican. This strategy may work this time but like the teen who is finally allowed back to the dysfunctional home that was the cause of her troubles these Trump backers will harbor resentments for the rest of their days.
If a Cruz or Rubio were to be elected those resentments will rise up even uglier.
I think there is a key point here. I don’t know if Trump supporters are the same as the Tea Partiers, but for both groups I don’t think they will accept defeat until they are allowed to bring their nominee to the general election and find out what the rest of the country thinks.
The Big Con, like the veiled racism, and privilege-sheltering masquerading as populism, is another example of someting long in the Republican playbook, which is just beung used mire openly by Trump. E.g. Someone making $35k a year allowing GOP to get him outraged about the “death tax.”
In many of these things, the change in wording helps spread the republican message. When it was called an inheritance tax, it didn’t quite have that same vibe. The republican team is very good at marketing.
I don’t know if the con man thing is sinking into his supporters or not. But I bet he offended a bunch of Christians by talking about his dick size.
If he did not offend a bunch of “Christians” by talking about rounding up immigrants and shipping them back over the border, thereby breaking up families, and if he did not offend a bunch of “Christians” by encouraging people at his rallies to beat people up, and if he did not offend a bunch of “Christians” by saying that he could shoot and kill a child on Fifth Avenue and people would still love him, then I am pretty sure that the “Christians” who support him won’t care about his anatomy, either. It’s all part of the irony that is Donald Trump.
Reblogged this on alteregoliz.
Sure hope you’re correct this time – I was looking for the Drumpf campaign to fold in Nov…
What’s going to happen to the Trump supporters when they realize they’ve been conned? If they are angry now, just imagine what the humiliation and disappointment
of this situation could fuel.
Maybe we should call out his campaign as being run like a time-share hustle. That ought to help elicit the gut reaction to avoid being scammed.
Why would you think the Trump supporters are more conned than the Romney supporters, the McConnell supporters, the Ryan, Cruz or Rubio supporters? The Republican Party has sold doing nothing at all and trying to dismantle government altogether as being good government for thirty-seven years.
People like yourself, Doug Muder, and lots of other left-leaning pundits have chosen to either ignore or reframe that. RMoney’s “capital investments” have benn nothing of the sort. They’ve been credit card buying of assets and then the controlled and planned looting of those assets in order to build “profits” at the expense of workers and customers of said businesses. The truth continues to be that Republicans worship and emulate conmen, and many Democrats do as well.
The business of America for generations has been both long and short cons. Trump lives the American Dream, making other people pay me to profit. Call those particular cards spades and admit he has a flush.
I’m certainly not going to claim that Republican politics — or politics in general — has been direct and honest until Trump. But I think the Trump con is on a different scale than what we’ve seen before. I will have to flesh that idea out in future weeks.
The John Oliver clip is great.
This makes sense. Calling Trump a con man who has taken advantage of the same kind of people who are now supporting him has to be the one thing that sticks. Except it won’t. I realized watching his victory speech the other night that he can even turn this to his advantage. He mentioned the Trump University lawsuit, and said that he could have settled it easily, but chose not to, because he was going to win it. He pointed out that the people suing him signed contracts, and if he delivered what he promised (what he really promised, not what they thought he promised), then he has nothing to worry about.
Until then, I had wondered how he would allow himself to be put on the stand right after the convention. He’s doing it because it will be free advertising that will make him look good. The people he fooled with his fake university are nothing at all like the people supporting him now. The former are greedy fools, while the latter are smart people following the really smart guy.
It’s easy to laugh at the other guy when he slips on a banana peel, and it’s not a problem until you slip on one, too.
Two points: First, Lee Atwater’s old line that if you’re explaining, you’re losing. I think that still holds. When people who haven’t decided to support Trump yet tune in and see him explaining that he’s not really a con man, it doesn’t help him.
Second, I don’t think that’s the last word, and we can’t let it be the last word. That pile of “successful” Trump products was actually not a pile of Trump products. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/10/daily-show-debunks-trump-steaks-wine-magazine-it-s-all-bullsh-t.html
And other products amounted to nothing more than Trump licensing his name to someone else. Maybe this is what he means when he says his net worth is “ten billion dollars,” most of which is the value of his last name, such as it is.
“Maybe this is what he means when he says his net worth is “ten billion dollars,” most of which is the value of his last name, such as it is.”
One of the many good things in the John Oliver clip above is pulled from court documents in which Trump/Drumpf says that his estimate of his net worth fluctuates based on how he feels.
When I point this out to Trump supporters, the usual response is that all politicians are con men and liars and at least with Trump they know what they’re buying. I despair for the future of the republic.
Sent from my iPad
>
I can’t think of any other candidate who took people’s condo deposits and then didn’t build the building.
Also, I think this blunts the spread of the message, if nothing else. Trump didn’t catch on by promising to be no worse than the other liars and crooks.
So your experience has been that Trump supporters agree that he conned people with his condo developments and with Trump University? And they think that’s OK, and they still support him?
I hoped to use this post to help some of my right-wing women friends grapple with their uncomfortable feelings about voting for Trump in the general election. But then I ran head-on into “and Trump-supporting women probably think Kelly is a little too smart and pretty and full of herself.” I cannot direct this to the Republican women with whom I communicate, who tell me that they are angry at “arrogant liberals” for telling them they are too stupid to vote. I get it. I’m a Clinton supporter who was deeply insulted by Bernie-splainers telling me that I “don’t have to vote for Hilary just because she is a woman.” Many Republicans don’t want to vote for Trump, but are so turned off by Democrats and other liberals. Doug — you are a great writer, and I love your posts. But I’d love to find a good political writer who can tell the truth about Trump in plain language without being insulting to his supporters. It’s not that I disagree with the sentiments and anger behind the snarky condescension — I indulge in it far too often myself. it’s just not effective at turning people around. And we need to turn people around.
Thanks for that criticism. I’ll keep it in mind.
“help some of my right-wing women friends grapple with their uncomfortable feelings about voting for Trump”
What about voting for Trump makes them uncomfortable?
OK, so I followed the Trackback link to Phil Ebersole’s blog, which provided an interesting insight. The topic that Trump talks about the most is trade – stuff like American companies sending jobs to Mexico and China.
Adding that to the mix, it makes total sense that most of his support comes from people without any college education. That’s because those are the people most affected by jobs leaving the country, and they have the most trouble finding another one. And as has been pointed out on this blog in the past, the left doesn’t really have solutions for the white working class and their problems.
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