Whenever there is mass confusion and complexity, people automatically gravitate to the strongest, most confident voice. We humans don’t like uncertainty, so we are attracted to those who offer clarity and simple answers, even if the answers are wrong or incomplete. Master Persuaders can thrive in chaotic environments by offering the clarity people crave. And if an environment is not chaotic already, a skilled persuader who understands both social media and the news business can easily stir the pot to create an advantage through chaos. Candidate Trump was a champion of this method.
There is an old banking saying: If you borrow a million dollars from a bank, the bank essentially owns you. But if you borrow $10 billion, you own the bank. That’s because the bank can foreclose on your measly million-dollar loan without much pain on its side, but the bank would have trouble surviving if it wrote off a $10 billion loss. The bank is forced to work with a large borrower, and maybe renegotiate terms. But the million-dollar borrower is out of luck because the bank has all the power at that dollar level.
This reminds me a lot of Trump’s strategy of sucking all the energy out of the news cycle until his competition had no way to breathe. If Trump had tiptoed into the election, the mainstream media would have owned him. And they would have treated him like a clown, before moving on to talk about his competition. So Trump didn’t tiptoe. He went in so hard, and so provocatively, that the media had no economic choice but to focus on him. He was pure gold for the press. And because of that, he came to own them, at least in the limited sense of dominating their news cycle.
If you don’t know a lot about persuasion, or strategy, or the news media’s business model, you might have seen Trump’s actions as symptoms of narcissism and buffoonery, nothing more. You might have asked yourself who in their right mind would intentionally be so provocative as to attract nonstop negative news coverage. The answer is a Master Persuader. The extra criticism was worth the pain because it sucked up all the media attention and rendered his Republican primary challengers invisible.
Amazingly, Trump’s strategy worked even though the news coverage it invited was overwhelmingly negative. This highlights a dividing line between a normal trained persuader and a true Master Persuader. Trump probably knew that one arrow in the chest could kill him, but if he had a thousand arrows, lined up just right, he could sleep on top of their pointy ends the same way a bed of nails works. No individual arrow’s point has to support much weight if you bunch them closely together. Trump deactivated the incoming attacks by ensuring there were too many of them. The news business has to cover the newest stories, at the expense of the old ones. Trump could relegate any unflattering story to the back burner by introducing new provocations (often via tweet) every day.
How do I know Trump was cleverly and intentionally hogging all of the press attention—both good and bad—and not simply flailing around? We have reports that Trump told people in advance he planned to suck all the oxygen out of the race.1 That doesn’t mean it happened. But by the end of this book, I hope to persuade you it would be consistent with Trump’s persuasion skills.
Trump used his mastery of the news cycle to create the impression that he was the most important person running for president, even if you hated him. When people are important, we start to feel they must be capable too, at least to some degree, because being capable is usually what makes people important. Our minds are primed to see important, capable people as leaders. And that instinct—to follow the most important and capable leader—can be more influential than facts and policies.
Trump was confident and clear about his priorities. But he was famously unclear about his preferred policy details. That is good persuasion technique. It allowed supporters to see whatever they wanted to see. But the details never mattered as much as the big picture. And the big picture was that Trump was a clear and strong voice in a scary and confusing world.