Trump has almost settled on his post-attempted-insurrection marketing pitch

[DonViejo]

By Philip Bump
March 1, 2021 at 10:19 a.m. EST

Nearly six years into Donald Trump’s emergence in national politics, we tend to lose sight of what he had been doing for the previous four decades. For most of his life before seeking the presidency, Trump worked in real estate in New York, a special category of occupation that combines the laid-back approach stereotypical of the city with the dedication to honesty we expect from salespeople.

Trump is understood to be an effective marketer, a trait attributed to his ability to successfully brand things. During his time running for and serving as president, we could watch how this works. His Twitter feed and rallies were essentially large focus groups, with the president throwing out assertions and claims and seeing what worked and what didn't. Over time, smoothed-out phrases and ideas would emerge from this verbal rock tumbler and become fixtures in Trump's rhetoric, often integrated into elaborate cloaks meant to obscure obvious realities.

One of the first things he said during his lengthy speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday was a classic of the genre. “He wants to put you all out of business,” Trump said of President Biden, the man who beat him in the 2020 presidential election. “He’s not okay with energy. He wants windmills, windmills. The windmills that don’t work when you need them.”

Trump returned to the theme later, as he lifted up an inaccurate line of argument about Texas’s recent power outages. Trump disparaged windmills as being “bad for the environment,” unreliable bird-killing machines that “destroy the landscapes.”

This is a very particular cloak that Trump has been sporting for about a decade. For years, he battled and disparaged wind power not in the United States but in Scotland, where an offshore farm threatened to be visible from a pricey golf course he’d purchased in the country. Trump fought and sued and disparaged and ranted, throwing out every nasty thing he could imagine to try to undercut the effort. This is an important part of how this works: Trump will happily embrace any claim, not matter how ridiculous, if it serves his purpose. He’s the salesman of dubious ethical fortitude who will do whatever it takes to close that deal.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/01/trump-has-almost-settled-his-post-attempted-insurrection-marketing-pitch

[Harker]

1. The art of the spiel. n/t