Trump Is Still Around Because He Knows You Love Talking About Him

Want him to finally go away? You first have to understand how he’s playing you like a fiddle

I’m writing this in mid-August, about 90 days from the 2016 election. Donald Trump is taking a beating in the polls and in the press.

The amount of bad PR he’s gotten this week would have buried a normal celebrity a long time ago. But for some reason, he still has support, and he simply refuses to go away.

He has built the most resilient public persona we’ve seen in decades.

How did he do it?

Trump is likely smarter than you think

To understand why Trump is still around, let’s first acknowledge that he has gotten really far in the presidential race, especially considering:

• He has no political qualifications
• He has not built a juggernaut campaign machine
• He continues to offend millions of people on a daily basis

If you can put your feelings about him aside for a second and just consider his claim that he is a genius-level businessman … things might start to make sense.

There is some evidence, after all. He has crushed people who have been playing this game for decades. He has done it without spending as much as they did. He has won millions of votes.

Come on, he is doing something right.

And I propose that is because he has a smart strategy that involves a deep understanding of business models and media manipulation:

The Donald Trump Outrage Strategy

As a businessman, Trump surely knows this basic principle of business:

But since we’re in an election, he’s probably thinking of that as:

This is a fair analogy, given that awareness and name recognition have been correlated with better polling performance.

While this may be obvious to everyone, the genius of Trump is that he’s taken this playbook a step further.

He understands the components of Awareness better than his competition:

He Plays A Game Only He Can Win

Running for president is now a billion-dollar industry. A lot of that money goes towards buying ads, billboards and airtime to raise awareness to get more votes.

However, Trump has been outgunned on money since the beginning; Jeb had a huge war chest, and there’s no way he can match Hillary’s fundraising machine. So buying ads to get more awareness to get more votes has never been a game he can win.

Fortunately (for him), he is a master of the other two factors. He knows exactly how to get daily press coverage and daily word of mouth.

And he knows how to do it for FREE.

Hijack The News Cycle

The Press’ business model today is built on one thing: pageviews.

Journalists are pushed to constantly publish new content, endlessly chasing more clicks, more eyeballs, more ad dollars.

Trump knows this, so he’s aligned his incentives with theirs.

So he constantly says and does outrageous things — his incessant soundbites are gifts to exhausted, deadline-chasing journalists who are behind on their pageview quotas.

He brilliantly manufactures controversy, he knows how to make a normally mundane event like a campaign logo unveil newsworthy, because he knows that if he is offensive enough, the media will write about it.

And the media know that you will read about it, because when you’re outraged, you will click to read their articles and give them the ad impressions they need to survive.

And so it keeps happening over and over again.

It should not surprise you that he will keep saying more and more outrageous things, because that’s exactly how his strategy works.

You are a critical part of The Donald Trump Outrage Strategy. Notice your role in the above. He knows exactly how to get the press to write about him, and they know you’ll keep reading articles about him, which incentivizes journalists to give him more press, which gives him a bigger and bigger megaphone.

Of course, this is a super risky strategy, since it relies on him out-doing himself every news cycle, and eventually there’s got to be a breaking point (I hope).

But in his own words: he’s going to keep doing what he’s doing as long as it’s working.

How Your Outrage Leads to Trump Votes

If he keeps offending people, if more and more people hate him by the day, why is he still around? And how can that possibly result in Trump votes?

Well, I’m betting that you have a few friends who are Trump supporters:

But let’s say that 95% of your friends will never ever vote for Trump. That means there are 5% who might. Okay, maybe 5% is not believable to you. Let’s say there’s just one (1) friend who would want to vote for Trump.

Say that 1 Trump maybe-voter then becomes a hardcore fan. They’re now going to preach and convert their friends to vote for Trump.

That 1 hardcore fan is way more valuable than the 100 Hillary maybe-voters who are “probably” going to show up in November.

He is relying on you to keep rewarding the media and to keep sharing Trump articles to your Facebook feed — this way, he can reach your friends who may consider voting Trump.

Disrupting The Donald Trump Outrage Strategy

If you want Trump to go away, if you want to make it more difficult for Trump to get more voters, you’ve got to reduce the free awareness he gets from you:

So if you don’t want him to win, you’ve got to disrupt his strategy.

Here are 4 things you can do:

Stop clicking Trump articles

This reduces the incentive for media outlets to keep publishing Trump articles, thereby reducing his media coverage, which means he gets less awareness and can reach less people.

Stop sharing Trump articles

This reduces the exposure he gets to your friends who might vote for Trump.

Convert a Trump supporter

Focus on the ones who can vote, ideally in a swing state. Focus on the ones who are on the fence and don’t waste your time on the Trump superfans. Trump has brilliantly built a persona where his hardcore fans somehow become more hardcore when there’s negative press about him.

Vote!

If you’re American and anti-Trump, this is the most powerful thing you can do. And it doesn’t matter if you’re in a liberal stronghold. As Samantha Bee said, if you don’t think Trump = America, then this needs to be a state-by-state landslide repudiating what he stands for.

One last thought

I wrote this with the assumption that Trump has done everything on purpose.

If that is the case, and every step has been a conscious, deliberate decision … then we can conclude that he is indeed a genius mastermind. A genius mastermind willing to plunge the country into partisan civil war to get to the presidency.

On the other hand, it’s also possible that I’ve given Trump way too much credit and all of his media coverage is all completely unintentional, which means he is just a political wrecking ball who is a breath away from becoming one of the most powerful people on the planet.

Both scenarios should terrify you.