Donald Trump may never have thought he had a chance of winning the White House; very few people did. But after he won the Republican nomination, he clearly realized he had the ultimate branding tool within reach: the US presidency. Every single minute he is president, his brand value and the value of his ongoing businesses is increasing, and he is therefore directly and significantly profiting from public office—precisely what conflict-of-interest rules are designed to prevent.
So now we are in entirely uncharted territory, because let’s face it: human megabrands are a relatively new phenomenon. There’s no rulebook that foresaw any of this. People keep asking—is he going to divest? Is he going to sell his businesses? Is Ivanka going to? But it’s not at all clear what these questions even mean, because their primary businesses are their names. You can’t disentangle Trump the man from Trump the brand; those two entities merged long ago. Every time he sets foot in one of his properties—a golf club, a hotel, a beach club—White House press corps in tow, he is increasing his overall brand value, which allows his company to sell more memberships, rent more rooms, and increase fees.
The logic of how the Trump family sees the relationship between branding and political office was laid bare in the lawsuit Melania Trump launched just before she became First Lady. She demanded $150 million in damages from the company that owns the Daily Mail website for falsely implying she worked in the past as an escort. And she had every right to sue for damages for that. But what was the basis for saying she had lost a staggering $150 million, given that she barely has a business of her own? The core of her legal case was that, as First Lady, she would have built—in the future—a valuable brand “in multiple product categories, each of which could have garnered multimillion-dollar business relationships for a multi-year term during which Plaintiff is one of the most photographed women in the world.” (The Daily Mail settled, apologizing to Trump and paying out an undisclosed sum.)
It’s not unprecedented for first wives to parlay their political profile into a lifestyle brand. Samantha Cameron, wife of David, waited just five months after her husband stepped down as British prime minister before announcing her own “working women” clothing line. But what is striking about Melania’s now-settled lawsuit is that she seemed to be trying to skip the stage of actually launching a serious brand and instead went straight to claiming the money. Moreover those original court filings make plain how the Trumps see public office: as a short-term investment to enormously swell the value of your commercial brand in the long run.
We can also see this with Ivanka, whose products have notoriously been hawked by taxpayer-funded public employees, including her father via Twitter, and his adviser Kellyanne Conway, who went on national television to do what she described as a “commercial,” telling viewers to “Go buy Ivanka’s stuff!” The conflicts tipped into self-parody on April 6, 2017, when, the Associated Press reported, “Ivanka Trump’s company won provisional approval from the Chinese government for three new trademarks, giving it monopoly rights to sell Ivanka brand jewellery, bags and spa services in the world’s second-largest economy.” But that’s not the only thing that happened that day. “That night, the first daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, sat next to the president of China and his wife for a steak and Dover sole dinner at Mar-a-Lago.” A political summit whose details had been arranged by none other than Jared Kushner. Asked about these kinds of conflicts, Ivanka invariably stresses that just as her father has supposedly distanced himself from the Trump Organization by putting it in the hands of his sons (while he still collects the profits), Ivanka has put her company in the hands of “independent trustees”—her husband’s brother and sister (while she still collects the profits). This goes well beyond nepotism; it’s the US government as a for-profit family business.
We know that Trump’s presidency has made the family of brands more valuable because Ivanka’s business reported record sales after Kellyanne Conway made her televised pitch. Mar-a-Lago has already increased its membership fees, to $200,000 a year from $100,000. And why not? Now, for your fee, you might find yourself witnessing a high-stakes conversation about national security over dinner. You might get to hobnob with a visiting head of state. You might even get to witness Trump announcing that he has just launched an air assault on a foreign country. And, of course, you might even get to meet the President himself, and have the chance to quietly influence him. (No public records are kept of who comes and goes from the club, so who knows?) For decades, Trump has been selling the allure of proximity to wealth and power—it is the meaning of his brand. But now he’s able to offer, to his paying customers, the real deal.
Trump’s ownership of Mar-a-Lago is telling in itself. A decade before Trump purchased the property in 1985, the owner of the estate, socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post, had bequeathed it to the US government in the hopes that it could be used as a presidential retreat or a “Winter White House.” But no president used it and it was eventually returned. Long before the 2016 election, Trump had enjoyed boasting about the fact that he lived in a house intended for presidents. Indeed, in retrospect it is as if he was playing at being president for three decades. And now, with the 2016 elections, that fantasy has become a reality—or is it reality that has been swallowed whole by Trump’s fantasy? As with all things Trump, it’s genuinely difficult to tell. Trump may call his Palm Beach estate the “Winter White House” or the “Southern White House,” but it is, of course, no such thing. The White House is a public institution; Mar-a-Lago remains a private, for-profit, members-only club with the proceeds flowing directly to Trump and his family.
Any president who refused to sell his business would face potential conflicts of interest, since the actions of the US government can impact everything from stock prices to, as we will see in a couple of chapters, the price of oil. But brand-based companies like Trump’s are different beasts entirely. The conflicts of interest are not only tied to specific policies or actions. Rather, the conflicts are omnipresent and continuous, embedded in the mere fact of Trump being president. That’s because the value of lifestyle brands fluctuates wildly depending on the space they occupy in the culture. So anything that increases Donald Trump’s visibility, and the perception of him as all-powerful, actively increases the value of the Trump brand, and therefore increases how much clients will pay to be associated with it—to slap it on their new condo development, say, or, on a smaller scale, to play on his golf courses or buy one of his ties.
And there is no sign that Trump is backing off exploiting that fact to its fullest advantage. According to a New York Times report in April 2017, “Mr. Trump’s enterprise, now run by his two adult sons, has 157 trademark applications pending in 36 countries.”
In January 2017, Donald Trump’s son Eric went on a trip to Uruguay to meet with a developer who is buying the right to use the Trump name on his new tower. At the time, the public scandal was how much US taxpayers’ money went to pay for the Secret Service and other government staff who traveled with Eric on that trip: around $100,000 in hotel costs, a direct public subsidy to Trump’s private dealings. But the deeper scandal is what they were in Uruguay to promote: the Trump brand, which had just been made so much more valuable by the fact that its owner was about to be sworn in as US president.
And this says nothing about the potential for corruption, which is dizzying. Given that what the Trump sons—Eric and Donald Jr.—are selling is ephemeral (a name), a buyer could pay $6 million for it or could pay $60 million. Who’s to judge what constitutes a fair market-value price? More worryingly, who’s to say what services are being purchased when a private company pays millions to lease the Trump brand? Do they really think it’s that valuable to their condo tower, or do they think that by throwing in an extra $5 million, they might be looked on more favorably in other dealings that require a friendly relationship with the White House? It’s very difficult to see how any of this can be untangled. A brand is worth whatever buyers are willing to pay for it. That’s always been the appeal of building a business on this model—that something as ephemeral as a name could be vested with such real-world monetary value.
The Trump Organization has said it will not make any new deals for foreign properties, to prevent an appearance of impropriety. But this isn’t just an international question. If a US city or state government grants a Trump development a break on taxes or regulations, are they really doing it because they think this particular business will help their community—or because they want something from the White House? Same goes for any government or business—foreign or domestic—that chooses a Trump property for an event or as a place for employees to stay. Do they really think it’s the best option, or are they trying to curry favor?
What’s fascinating about these ethics questions is that they are so similar to the scandals surrounding the Clinton Foundation, which may well have contributed to Hillary’s electoral loss. There were many thorny questions about what a private company or foreign government thought they were getting when they made a hefty donation to the Clinton Foundation. Were they being purely philanthropic, moved by the scourge of infectious diseases and childhood obesity? Or were they also making a calculation that their donation would pay some dividends because Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and looked likely to become the next US president?
Those were valid concerns, and Trump didn’t hesitate to raise them about his rival. But with the money the Trump sons are collecting from leasing their father’s name, and the favors they are negotiating, the potential for influence peddling is of a different order: we now have money flowing to the family of a sitting president, not a projected president, and with not even the pretext of philanthropy, which the Clinton Foundation at least had. This is not to exonerate the Clintons—far from it. The decades Bill and Hillary spent blurring ethical lines at the Foundation are part of what set the stage for Trump to annihilate those lines altogether (more on that in Chapter 6).
A few months into the new administration, the cover of the New Yorker featured an illustration of Trump whacking golf balls at the White House, shattering window after window. It’s a striking image, in large part because it slowly dawns that the broken windows are not at Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower but the publicly owned building where Trump’s own family has assiduously avoided living.
And this points to a difficult truth. With every alleged ethics violation, with every brazen lie, with every deranged tweet, this administration leaves the public sphere more broken and degraded. Even if corruption (or treason) ultimately costs Trump the White House, what will be left behind will be wreckage—proof of the fundamental premise of Trump’s political project: that government is not just a swamp, it’s a burden. That there is nothing worth protecting. That private is better than public. And if that’s all true, why not wreck the place before you leave—figuratively if not literally.
It’s a reminder that Trump’s political career would have been impossible without the degradation of the whole idea of the public sphere, which has been unfolding over decades. It could never have happened without the idea that “government is not the solution, it is the problem,” as Ronald Reagan famously put it. And it could never have happened had that message not been followed up with decades of deregulation that essentially legalized bribery, with outrageous sums of corporate money flowing into politics.
It’s absolutely true that the system is corrupt. It is a swamp. And people know it. They know that the rewriting of the rules in favor of a small group of corporate interests and the one percent has been a bipartisan process—that it was Bill Clinton who deregulated the banks, setting the stage for the 2008 collapse, and it was Obama who chose not to prosecute the bankers, and that the Democratic candidate running against Trump would almost surely have done no different.
Sure, it’s preposterous for a self-described billionaire sitting on a golden throne to pass himself off as a savior of the working class. But a pitch as patently irrational as “Trust me because I cheated the system” could only have sold to a significant portion of the American public because what passed for “business as usual” in Washington well before Trump looked a whole lot like corruption to everyone else.
That’s why so many people have been happy to treat electoral politics as macabre entertainment. Once politics has reached such a debased state, why bother protecting it from a boor like Trump? It’s a cesspool anyway, so let the games begin. As a resident of Toronto, this is a pathology that I’ve lived through before. Our former mayor, Rob Ford, was something of a municipal rehearsal for Trump. Ford, who died in 2016, created a performance-based image that was impossible to shame—because his brand was being shameless. Even when he was caught on tape smoking crack, it didn’t finish him off, because it was still the wacky Rob Ford show, and his supporters were his semi-ironic loyal audience, taking it all in like a Saturday Night Live sketch. But, as with Trump, the over-the-top performance and the personal scandals distracted from a sinister agenda, a pseudopopulism that specialized in handouts to corporations, a blank check for police, and eroded services for the most vulnerable.
I didn’t foresee branding culture going this far when I started writing about it twenty years ago. But I’m also not surprised. Back then, I saw branding as a colonial process: it seeks to absorb ever more space and real estate and create a self-enclosed bubble. What’s extraordinary about Donald Trump’s presidency is that now we are all inside the Trump branded world, whether we want to be or not. We have all become extras in his for-profit reality TV show, which has expanded to swallow the most powerful government in the world.
Is there any escape? The essential immorality of Trump’s brand does present unique barriers to holding this administration accountable. And yet there is hope. In fact, Trump’s animating life force—the quest for money—may actually make him more vulnerable than any president before.
Back when I published No Logo, we used to call it “culture jamming,” and the trick was always the same: identify the big bold idea a company is selling and then expose the dirty reality behind the shine. The ability of consumers and activists to impact the behavior of a commercial brand has been demonstrated many times, most recently by the successful campaign to push Bill O’Reilly off the air at Fox News, following revelations that he and his employer had paid out $13 million to settle sexual harassment allegations (without admission of guilt).
Realizing that there was no shaming the O’Reilly brand, Color of Change, a racial justice organization, alongside several women’s groups, took a backdoor approach: they went after the show’s advertisers, informing them that they were now considered accomplices in what seemed to be a long-term strategy of buying women’s silence. The advertisers heard the same from thousands of customers, online and off, and they began fleeing from the show in droves. Within less than three weeks of the settlement revelations breaking in the New York Times, and despite having the highest rated show on US cable news, O’Reilly was off the air (though with a golden handshake reportedly worth as much as $25 million).
The campaign showed that any brand can be jammed, even one as defiantly amoral as Trump’s—you just need to understand its weak points.
Since Trump’s personal brand is being “the boss” who does what he wants, one way to mess with it is to make him look like a puppet. It doesn’t really matter who is yanking the strings. Once they’re exposed, Trump’s carefully nurtured image begins to slip. And this tactic clearly works: Trump was driven so mad by the persistent jokes about #PresidentBannon that he took to Twitter to proclaim himself the supreme decider, and the status of his once all-powerful chief strategist seemed to rapidly decline.
Since the Trump brand is all about having bags and bags of money, the other way to jam it is to make him less rich. And as with the O’Reilly strategy, the best way to do that is by sending his branding empire into crisis. #GrabYourWallet, the clearinghouse for boycotts of Trump’s web of brands, has been on this since before Trump was elected, and has successfully helped to pressure several chains to drop various Trump brands.
In the grand scheme of Trump’s branding empire, these are dents. The main source of revenue for the Trump Organization is selling and renting office and condo units and leasing Trump’s name to real estate companies around the world. Trump was clearly betting that being president would drive up the price. But what if he is proven wrong? What if he starts losing commercial renters because they are coming under pressure for their association with his brand (several boycott campaigns like this are already under way)? And what if developers come under so much public pressure that they decide having Trump’s name on their façade is actually costing them revenue? Already, in New York City, tenants of Trump Place demanded that their building manager take the Trump name off their home. As one resident said, she was tired of feeling “disgust” each time she walked into her building. The manager complied and Trump’s name was removed.
And when the Trump sons went to Vancouver to celebrate the opening of the latest Trump temple, they were met with protests and boycotts from local politicians. If these kinds of protests spread, more developers could decide to de-Trump themselves. And it’s a fair bet that if his golden name starts disappearing off giant phallic symbols from Vancouver to Manila, Trump would not take it well, nor would his sons, who are reportedly already worried about the damage that senior advisors like Steve Bannon may have done to the family name.
In a parallel tactic, when the White House closed down its call-in comment lines in January 2017, one group—whitehouseinc.org—suggested voters phone Trump hotels and resorts and tell whoever answered that they were upset about the president’s plans to take away their health insurance, or any other policy grievances they had. It was a smart tactic. Tens of thousands reportedly made the calls, and one month later the White House reopened the lines.
If any of this seems unfair, consider this: The whole reason we expect politicians to divest their financial holdings, or put them in a real blind trust, is that having active business holdings while serving in office creates all kinds of opportunities for conflicts of interest and backdoor influence. Trump has chosen not to divest. His adviser-daughter has made the same choice. Which is why it’s perfectly legitimate to use those choices to try to influence the hell out of them.
If his branding empire loses enough revenue, and his personal boss image is sufficiently battered, Trump might just course-correct on some of his more inflammatory policies. At the very least, jamming his central pitch to voters—“trust me, I’m a successful billionaire”—will hurt his chances in 2020.
But before we get there, we are all going to be subjected to a lot more of the Trump show.