by Naomi Klein
That they are. Trump and his team are set to detonate programs that protect children from environmental toxins, have told gas companies they no longer need to report all of the powerful greenhouse gases they are spewing, and are pushing dozens and dozens of measures along the same lines. This is, in short, a great unmaking. Which is why Trump and his appointees are laughing at the feeble objections over conflicts of interest—the whole thing is a conflict of interest. That’s the point.
And for no one more than Donald Trump, a man who has merged so completely with his corporate brand that he is clearly unable to tell where one stops and the other begins. One of the most remarkable aspects of the Trump presidency so far is the emergence of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s personal resort in Palm Beach, as a carnivalesque, members-only, all-for-profit “Winter White House” (it was even briefly advertised as such on state department websites). One club member told the New York Times that going to Mar-a-Lago was like “going to Disneyland and knowing Mickey Mouse will be there all day long”—only in this exercise in full-contact branding, it’s not Disneyland but Americaland, and the President of the United States is Mickey Mouse.
The Ultimate Brand Bully
When I read that quote, I realized that if I was going to try to understand this presidency, I’d have to do something I’d resisted for a long time: delve back into the world of corporate marketing and branding that was the subject of my first book, No Logo.
The book focused on a key moment in corporate history—when behemoths such as Nike and Apple stopped thinking of themselves primarily as companies that make physical products, and started thinking of themselves first and foremost as manufacturers of brands. It was in the branding—which manufactured a sense of tribal identity—that they believed their fortunes lay. Forget factories. Forget needing to maintain a huge workforce. Once they realized that their biggest profits flowed from manufacturing an image, these “hollow brands” came to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter who made their products or how little they were paid. They left that to the contractors—a development with devastating repercussions for workers at home and abroad, and one that was also fueling a new wave of anticorporate resistance.
Researching No Logo had required four years of total immersion in branded culture—four years of watching and rewatching Super Bowl ads, scouring Advertising Age for the latest innovations in corporate synergy, reading soul-destroying business books on how to get in touch with your personal brand values, making excursions to Niketowns, visiting Asian sweatshops, going to monster malls, to branded towns, heading out on nighttime billboard raids with ad-busters and culture jammers.
Some of it was fun—I’m far from immune to the allure of good marketing. But by the end, it was as if I had passed some kind of tolerance threshold and developed a condition close to a brand allergy. If Starbucks had come up with a new way to “unbrand” their stores, or Victoria’s Secret had appropriated Indigenous headdresses on the runway, I didn’t want to write about it—I had moved on and left that rapacious world behind. The trouble is, to understand Trump you really have to understand the world that made him what he is, and that, to a very large extent, is the world of branding. He reflects all the worst trends I wrote about in No Logo, from shrugging off responsibility for the workers who make your products via a web of often abusive contractors to the insatiable colonial need to mark every available space with your name. Which is why I decided to delve back into that glossy world to see what it could tell us about how Donald Trump rose to the world’s most powerful job, and maybe even what it was saying about the state of politics more broadly.
Transcending the World of Things
The rise of the Superbrands, like the one Trump built around his brash persona, has its roots in a single, seemingly innocuous idea developed by management theorists in the mid-1980s: that to be successful, corporations must primarily produce brands as opposed to products.
Until that time, although it was understood in the corporate world that bolstering one’s brand name through advertising was important, the primary concern of every solid manufacturer was the production of goods. As a 1938 editorial in Fortune magazine put it,“the basic and irreversible function of an industrial economy is the making of things…It is in the factory and on the land and under the land that purchasing power originates.”
But by the 1980s, sales of classic brand-name goods like Tide, Levi’s, and Marlboro had begun to falter. The problem seemed to be that the market was flooded with nearly identical products and, with the economy in recession, many were making decisions based on price, not brand name. The old tricks—billboards, TV ads—didn’t seem to be working anymore; it was as if consumers had built up some sort of resistance. (Or, as ad executive David Lubars memorably put it, consumers “are like roaches—you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while.”)
At around this same time, a new kind of corporation began to rival the traditional all-American manufacturers for market share. These were the Nikes and Apples and, later, the Tommy Hilfigers and Starbucks and so on. These pioneers had a different model: Create a transcendent idea or brand surrounding your company. Use it to connect with consumers who share its values. Then charge a steep premium for products that are less about the objects themselves than about the profound human desire to be part of a tribe, a circle of belonging.
So when kids lined up all night to buy $250 Nike sneakers, they weren’t exactly buying the sneakers; they were buying the idea of “Just Do It” and the dream of Michael Jordan, who had become a one-man Superbrand, a term first used to describe the athlete’s growing empire. When their parents bought Apple computers, they were bringing home a piece of a deeply optimistic vision of the future, captured in the slogan “Think Different.” (The aura of authenticity increased with each revolutionary and artistic icon, living or dead, whose face graced the campaign: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Picasso, Mandela, the Dalai Lama.) And when commuters were suddenly paying four times what they used to for a cup of coffee, it was because Starbucks wasn’t really selling coffee; it was selling, according to its CEO, the idea of the “third place,” not home, not work. (The third place used to be actual community spaces where people would gather without the help of corporations, but those spaces were fast disappearing.)
Another key development in this period was the notion that, since the true product was the brand, it could be projected onto any number of seemingly unconnected physical commodities. Ralph Lauren launched a line of paints, Virgin went into wedding dresses and colas, Starbucks had a line of jazz CDs. The possibilities seemed endless.
Many of these highly branded companies made the (then) bold claim that producing goods was only an incidental part of their operations, and that, thanks to recent victories in trade liberalization and labor law reform, they could have their products produced for them at bargain-basement prices by contractors and subcontractors, many of them overseas. It didn’t really matter who did the physical work, because the real value lay not in manufacturing but in design, innovation, and of course marketing.
A consensus soon emerged at the management level that a great many corporations that did not embrace this model were bloated, oversized; they owned too much, employed too many people, and were weighed down with too many things. The old-fashioned process of producing—running one’s own factories, being responsible for tens of thousands of full-time, permanent employees—began to look less like the route to success and more like a clunky liability. The goal was to become a hollow-brand—own little, brand everything.
Pretty soon, multinationals were competing in a race toward weightlessness: whoever owned the least, had the fewest employees on the payroll, and produced the most powerful images as opposed to things, won the race.
No Space, Few Jobs
The meteoric rise of this business model had two immediate impacts. Our culture became more and more crowded with marketing, as brands searched out fresh space and new “brand extensions” with which to pro
ject their big ideas and reach their target markets. Work and workers, on the other hand, experienced a sharp discounting and were treated as increasingly disposable.
Brands like Nike and Adidas competed fiercely in the marketing sphere, and yet they manufactured their products in some of the same factories, with the same workers stitching their shoes. And why not? Making stuff was no longer considered a “core competency.” Head offices (now increasingly being called “campuses”) wanted to be as free as possible to focus on what they considered the real business at hand: creating a corporate mythology powerful enough to project meaning onto pretty much any object, simply by stamping their brand on it.
In the press, this phenomenon was often reported as Company X or Y deciding to move their factories to a part of the world where labor was cheaper. But as I found when I visited sweatshops producing name-brand goods like Gap clothing and IBM computers in Indonesia and the Philippines, the truth was somewhat different. In most cases, these companies were not moving their factories in North America and Europe and reopening them in Asia, but rather closing them down and never reopening them, anywhere. This period saw a proliferation of very complex supply chains, where it became increasingly difficult to sort out where a product was being produced and by whom. It also saw a wave of scandals: again and again intrepid investigative journalists and labor groups would reveal that, say, a Michael Jordan–branded Nike shoe or a Disney-branded t-shirt was being made under horrific sweatshop conditions in Haiti or Indonesia. But when journalists or consumers tried to hold the brand accountable, the company would almost invariably declare, “We’re as horrified as you are. Which is why we’re going to stop doing business with that contractor.”
It’s no secret why this model took off. If you did it right—if you made beautiful commercials, invested heavily in design, and tried to embody your brand identity through countless sponsorship arrangements and cross-promotions—many people were willing to pay almost anything for your products. Which is why the success of what came to be called “lifestyle brands” set off a kind of mania, with brands competing with one another over who had the most expansive network of brand extensions, or who could create the most immersive 3-D experiences—chances for customers to crawl inside and merge with their favorite brands.
So what does all this 1990s history have to do with Donald Trump? A great deal. Trump built an empire by following this formula precisely. And then, as a candidate, he figured out how to profit from the rage and despair it left behind in communities that used to do the kind of well-paid manufacturing that companies like his long ago abandoned. It’s quite a con.
The Trump Show
In the eighties, when Trump first became a national figure, he was still a fairly traditional real estate developer who happened to have a bottomless desire to see his own name in print and pretty much everywhere else. He splashed his name on buildings around New York and Atlantic City; he worked the press relentlessly; and he turned his relationship with his wife and mistress into a live-action soap opera. As a result, Trump punched above his weight in terms of visibility: His face gazed off the cover of magazines, from Time to GQ. He landed cameos in Hollywood films and TV shows. And he understood something essential about branding early on. As he told Playboy: “The show is Trump, and it is sold-out performances everywhere.” Even so, the core of his business remained conventional: acquiring real estate and running those buildings, whether hotels or condo towers or casinos.
In the nineties, that started to change, mostly because Trump had so mismanaged his Atlantic City casinos that his bankers were taking over more and more of his business, even before he had his first few bankruptcies under his belt. He didn’t lose total control over his properties, though. Investors appeared to be convinced that they needed the Trump name—his personal brand—to keep the house of cards from crashing down. And that proved an important lesson in the real-world value of a studiously promoted name.
Even though he was still primarily a builder, Trump had seen the way companies like Nike were making a killing on the hollow-brand model. And gradually, he followed suit. At the start, his innovation was that he branded a part of the economy that had never been branded before: high-end real estate. Obviously, there were global branded hotel and resort chains before. But Trump pioneered the idea that where you work (an office tower), where you live (a condominium), and where you play (your golf club or vacation destination) would all be franchises of a single global luxury brand. Much like Celebration, Florida—Disney’s fully branded town—Trump was selling the opportunity for people to live inside his brand, 24/7.
The real breakthrough, however, came when Mark Burnett, head of a reality TV empire, pitched Trump on the idea of The Apprentice. Up until then, Trump had been busy coping with the fallout from his bankruptcies and the impatience of his bankers. Now, out of the blue, he was being offered a chance to leap into the stratosphere of Superbrands, those rarefied companies earning their enormous profits primarily by building up their brand meaning and then projecting it hither and yon, liberated from the burden of having to make their own products—or, in Trump’s case, build his own buildings.
He understood the potential immediately. Because the show would put the brightest possible spotlight on his gilded lifestyle, with long, lingering shots of his palatial homes and his luxury jets, it would do wonders to solidify his decades-long mission to equate the name Trump with material success. Before the first episode even aired, he was already lining up deals to license his name for a menswear line. He told the network’s publicist that, even if The Apprentice “doesn’t get ratings, it’s still going to be great for my brand.”
But it did get ratings—impressive ones. And pretty soon he had launched a complete menu of spinoff brands—from Trump cologne to Trump water to Trump eyewear to Trump mattresses to Trump University. As far as the current president of the United States was concerned, there was no category of product that couldn’t be brought into the Trump-branded bubble.
Most importantly, with The Apprentice, Trump wasn’t paying, as other brands do, to have his brand featured in a hit network TV show; he was getting paid a fortune for priceless free advertising. More than that, his shows collected millions by promoting other brands. In April 2011, for example, The Celebrity Apprentice was paid to promote more products on the air than any other show, 120 product placements in all. This is the mark of a true Superbrand: Trump built a brand that contains brand multitudes. (And in bringing his children into the show, he even began to breed brands.)
After you have pulled off a feat like that, what’s your next trick? Merge your brand with the ultimate symbol of power and authority: the White House.
Oligarch Chic
But before that could happen, Trump needed one more thing to complete his transformation. He radically changed the core of his business: real estate. Rather than building and owning the structures himself, as he had earlier in his career, Trump realized that he could make far easier money simply by selling his name to developers around the world, who would use his celebrity to attract buyers and customers for their office buildings, condos, and hotels. The outside developers would do the construction and carry all the liabilities. If the projects failed (as they frequently did), Trump still collected his licensing fee. And the fees were enormous. According to the Washington Post, on a single hotel-condo project in Panama, “Trump has earned at least $50 million on the project on virtually zero investment.”
He still owns a few flagship properties, including Trump Tower in New York and Mar-a-Lago in Florida. But if you look at the broader network of a great many Trump-branded properties—from the Trump International Golf Club in Dubai to the many other Trump properties in India, Canada, Brazil, South Korea, and New York City—what you see is that Trump either doesn’t own them himself or owns just a piece of them. His revenue comes from leasing his name.
A large part of Trump’s international success was timing. He entered the global high-end real estate market at
a time when an unprecedented amount of untaxed private wealth was sloshing around looking for safe places to park, as it still is. According to James S. Henry, a senior advisor with the UK-based Tax Justice Network, in 2015 the estimated private financial wealth of individuals stashed unreported in tax havens around the globe was somewhere between $24 trillion and $36 trillion. Gilded condos, with a flashy aesthetic pitched perfectly to newly minted oligarchs from Moscow to Colombia, fit the bill perfectly.
But Trump’s market wasn’t just the rich. His Apprentice-era brand empire allowed him to appeal to wealthy and middle-income consumers simultaneously. For the well-heeled and flashy, there was membership at his beach and golf clubs, or a unit in a Trump-branded tower, with furnishings from the Trump homeware collection. For the masses who don’t have that kind of cash, Trump auctioned off little pieces of the dream—a glossy red Trump tie, a Trump steak, a Trump book.