The Donald Trump phenomenon confused the great minds of the Hillary Clinton campaign. Needing to thwart a new, weightless force in American politics, they nicknamed him Dangerous Donald, rubber stamping his renegade brand. Leave it to Trump to have to give them a better one: Fraud.
Last Tuesday, Trump called a press conference to prove he gave $6 million (Dh22 million) to veterans’ groups — a very large sum of very beautiful money that he totally would have given even without the press hounding him. Later, United States district court judge Gonzalo Curiel released 400 pages of ‘Trump University’ documents showing how much Trump promises are worth.
The documents confirm what everyone who wasn’t making money off the deal already knew: That, like every get-rich-quick scheme, it reliably delivered that outcome to the people running it by efficiently separating hopeful attendees from their money in exchange for empty promises of billionaire real-estate savvy.
It’s uncanny how much Trump’s sham university sounds like his campaign. Trump U sales people were encouraged to pitch the three-day Gold Elite package to student-clients for the low, low price of $34,995, pushing clients to max out their credit cards or tap other assets to pay for it even if it put them financially at risk. (The Silver Elite package ran $19,495, while the Bronze Elite dinged students a mere $9,995.) An early part of the pitch included the “blast phase” that focused on “giving your clients hope again”.
If clients balked at the price of the Gold Elite package, sales people were told to tell them that everything was horrible and only one expert had the solution: You’re not even close to where you need to be, much less where you want to be. It’s time you fix your broken plan, bring in Mr Trump’s top instructors and certified millionaire mentors and allow us to put you and keep you on the right track. Your plan is BROKEN and WE WILL help you fix it.
Eschewing things like concrete strategies for making money (item one of which would, presumably, be “don’t spend $35,000 on three days of seminars in a hotel conference room), sales people were instead told to play on clients’ self-esteem and anxieties.
You don’t sell products, benefits or solutions — you sell feelings ... This sales process is based on managing the emotions of the client by focusing on the psychology of the sale. The metaphor used for this process is the Roller Coaster of emotions.
It’s not hard to hear echoes of everything Trump has sold his campaign on for nearly a year. At any given moment, America is riding a wave of fear, resentment and the certainty that it all can go away, just as long as we sign up for the Trump experience.
Good journalists have known for a while that the way you rattle Trump is by honestly reporting on his business acumen. It’s not great! You report on the fact that his construction empire now is largely his name franchised and slapped on other people’s projects. You report on the fact Trump’s steaks, airline, bike race and the United States Football League were failures. You report on how he does better hawking mattresses. You report on how he’d be $10 billion richer if he’d just invested his money in index funds .
The Trump balloon pops pretty easily. All you have to do is say that it kind of sucks.
It sounds big and luxurious and exclusive, but mostly it doesn’t work, apart from preying on people’s emotions, promising them champagne wishes and caviar dreams, then cashing their cheque and not giving a damn what happens afterward. In the short term, he loses his cool, but in the long term he loses his appeal.
Trump critics, especially the Clinton campaign, have been going about this all wrong. You don’t label him dangerous; it’s a label he’d gladly apply to himself. You don’t shriek that he’s unprepared on foreign policy and fails to observe Beltway niceties: People steeped in both brought America the Iraq war and Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). Just call him a scam artist.
There’s a very clear line waiting to be drawn between an authoritarian who promises hope and has no plans, and a man cashing $35,000 cheques after selling hope and delivering zero plans. You can puncture the Trump dream with the words “caveat emptor” until “Make America Great Again” reads like “There’s A Sucker Born Every Minute”.
If nothing else, beating Trump now with his own record of bilking the little guy is a much better deal than waiting until 2017 to see if millions of Americans can file a civil suit against a sitting president.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Jeb Lund is a Guardian US columnist. He also contributes to Rolling Stone, Vice and elsewhere.
