Can Donald Trump Buzz His Way to the White House?
As long as Americans feel unheard and disenfranchised, Trump can continue to use buzz to pretend to know them.
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Creating buzz – that curious mixture of baloney and authenticity that generates excitement – is not exactly new as a campaign strategy. But Donald Trump is taking it to new heights.
By the new Trump metric, the more the public knows about your crackpot ideas and your sex life, the better for buzz that translates into big rallies and action in the voter booth.
Trump’s Climb to the Top
Trump has already out-buzzed his defeated GOP rivals, who could not keep up with the added attention he received, such as more talking time during debates and even extra airtime afterward. Nor could they compete with the real-estate magnate’s domination in Google searches and social media mentions. Combine the presumptive GOP nominee’s instinct for generating talk and attention with a volatile, angry electorate, and you are in the realm of possibility that Trump might just buzz himself into the White House.
People want to be part of something, and the buzz surrounding Trump allows them to be part of the rejection of a failed status quo. That feels good. Intoxicating. Yes, it gives people a buzz.
The Presidential Buzz
Candidate Barack Obama got a good share of buzz during his 2008 presidential campaign, surprising the pundits with his ascendancy over rivals. Long before him, John F Kennedy proved to be a master of it during the 1960 campaign season, as Kathryn Cramer Brownell and Bruce J Schulman have pointed out in a Reuters Commentary piece.
Trump, for his part, has proven that no matter how unsavoury the content, regardless of pricks of conscience, buzz takes on a life of its own. Whether he is alluding to the size of his penis, or proposing an $8-billion wall on the border that Mexico would pay for, or insulting a female newscaster with menstrual references, his words and whims will be endlessly discussed.
On television, on Twitter, at backyard barbecues, Trump is the inexorable topic. His take on just about everything reverberates throughout the vast hive mind of popular and political culture.
Trumping the Media
“There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about,” Oscar Wilde once said, “and that is not being talked about.” Trump intuitively grasps the concept. He added his own noxious flavour in a comment to Esquire in 1991, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
At the end of March, Google trend data revealed that Trump was already the most-searched presidential candidate of all time, beating out Obama’s Google popularity in 2008.
All Publicity is Good Publicity
Exposure is key. Trump learned this early pursuing periodicals like “Gentleman’s Quarterly,” deploying over-the-top comments to garner press coverage during his ownership of the United States Football League and eventually affixing his name to anything, from hotel towers to wine to Serta Trump Home Collection, a line of mattresses.
This gift for exposure was extended and perfected during Trump’s 14 seasons on The Apprentice, when Americans were treated to his outsized personality bursting from their TV sets every week. His instantly recognisable face has grinned and glowered from magazine covers ranging from Time to The Economist to Playboy, and those issues tend to be top sellers – a phenomenon known in the trade as the “Trump bump.”
As of March, a New York Times analysis found that Trump had been given nearly $2 billion worth of coverage by broadcast, online and print outlets – essentially advertising for which he paid not a penny.
To achieve maximum buzz, you don’t wait for other people to talk about you. You talk constantly about yourself. Need an endorsement? Fake one, as Trump was accused of doing in claiming support from baseball legend Pete Rose. In marketing classes, this is called “establishing your brand.” Buzz begets brand, and brand begets buzz.
If you have buzz, you can say all manner of things that aren’t true. Writing about Trump in New York magazine, Andrew Sullivan, horrified at the billionaire’s rise, commented, “It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities.”
To be sure, there are dangerous, threatening alarm bells ringing throughout the Trump buzz – echoes of xenophobia, mindless sexism and thuggish authoritarianism. But there is also a ring of truth. The gulf between the will of the powerful and the will of the people has become too large, and the person who is willing to say that clearly will have buzz in their favour, as Senator Bernie Sanders has also found.
Trump’s Problematic Populism
Trump’s populism may be problematic, but its target is real. It’s not that Americans are increasingly open to being led by anyone, but rather that a certain category of someones – advocates of unregulated trade and markets, politicians beholden to moneyed interests, technocrats offering mere tweaks to the system – find it increasingly difficult to connect to a wide swath of the American public.
As long as large groups of Americans feel unheard and disenfranchised, increasingly insignificant and powerless over their dwindling destinies, then whoever buzzes their way through the establishment bulwark becomes mesmerising.
Elites might assert that inevitable, disembodied global economic forces are at work against the American people, and suggest that anyone offering an alternative to the status quo is a liar or a demagogue. But that line sounds empty to many working-class voters right now, no matter how many times it is repeated.
A void has been created that yearns to be filled. The buzz flows in.
(This story was produced in an arrangement with Reuters)