In February, I subscribed to all the presidential candidates’ email lists.
Since then, I’ve gotten over 1,000 requests for money. Today is the 17th of October, and so far, this month, I’ve heard from Hillary Clinton’s campaign 32 times and Donald Trump’s 53 times. (Carly Fiorina chimed in once in support of Trump, too.)
Sometimes I hear from them many times in a day. “Let’s bug our subscribers incessantly,” the theory seems to go, “so they’ll be more inclined to give us money!”
At first, I read each email — that lasted about a week. Now I usually let them pile up, but every week or so I’ll skim through to see if there’s anything interesting being said.
The email list is where the candidate speaks directly to their base, in terms they calculate are most likely to drive their base to take action — to actually open their wallet and send in a contribution. In other words, each candidate is saying “I think I have the kind of supporter who will respond most productively to this specific message.”
So the emails become an interesting lens through which to examine each campaign’s opinion of its supporters. Do they think they’re the type of people who’re driven by hope, or by fear? By sincere human appeals, or by stern orders? By pleading, or by threats? Or like Jeb!, by just being pathetic?
Let’s say you go to the doctor
Turns out that achy, oozing, blindingly-painful rash you thought was nothing is actually pretty serious. You need treatment right away.
There are two different treatments available for your condition. (There are some others that sound promising, but they’re still in clinical trials and you can’t get them.)
Treatment A is a prescription pill that’s been around a while. Doctors and researchers agree that it is moderately effective, although it does cause side effects. It’s a “Big Pharma” type medicine, which means their profits go into a huge black hole for them to do whatever with. In fact, the CEO of the company is, by some reports, not a nice person. But the medicine will probably keep you alive, at least for a few more years.
Treatment B is also a pill, but it’s not FDA approved — most doctors advise against taking it. Its website is full of claims like “The miracle medicine Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know about!” and “Research shows this pill could be as effective as many prescription drugs!” (There are no studies to back up this “research.”) In breathless tones, the ads boast that “No one else has made the secret medical breakthroughs that we have!” — but also warn that this information “may soon be banned by the government!”
The owner of the company who makes Treatment B is best known for being a wheeler-dealer in an altogether different industry, completely unrelated to medicine. He always seems to be in court, threatens to sue anyone who disagrees with him, and allegations of personal and professional misconduct follow wherever he goes.
But he’s bought a bunch of infomercials, full of testimonials from happy patients and explanations of everything wrong with Big Pharma and the medical establishment. Doctors, he says, “are a bunch of crooks” and his pill won’t just cure your illness, it’ll “make you feel young again” and “make you as strong as anyone you’ve ever seen.” There are no explanations given for how it might accomplish this in your body, and the ingredients of the pill are unknown.
The point is not that Hillary is great, and that Trump is a maniac. Reasonable people can claim both things, but I think that claim rings false to people who distrust Hillary and/or find Trump’s brazenness refreshing.
The point is that a Hillary Clinton presidency, for all its many flaws, would be survivable, whereas Donald Trump is an impostor, a snake oil salesman whose promises and claims smart people would instantly disbelieve in any other context.
Here’s what I mean.
Advancing our extraction technology
My stated purpose in subscribing to all the candidates’ email lists was to see if anyone would sell my contact information, and to whom. (I used unique email addresses for each subscription, so I could track and see where it showed up again.)
I got the idea from this article from 2012, “The Long Con.” Author Rick Perlstein explained his similar experiment:
In 2007, I signed on to the email lists of several influential magazines on the right, among them Townhall, which operates under the auspices of evangelical Stuart Epperson’s Salem Communications; Newsmax, the organ more responsible than any other for drumming up the hysteria that culminated in the impeachment of Bill Clinton; and Human Events, one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite publications.
The exercise turned out to be far more revealing than I expected. Via the battery of promotional appeals that overran my email inbox, I mainlined a right-wing id that was invisible to readers who encounter conservative opinion at face value.
Perlstein goes on to describe how the right-wing mailing lists, even those of nominally dignified publications, soon began to pester him with ads for penny stocks, get-rich-quick schemes, and no end of miracle cures and nutritional supplements “they don’t want you to know about”.
Of course, scams aren’t unique to any political leaning, and crappy clickbait ads clog up nearly every website these days. But as all good capitalists know, each market gravitates to practices that benefit that market, and clearly there is something about the conservative market that scam-mongers find profitable.
For example, did you know that Infowars sells its own, white-label branded herbal supplements?
For just $59.95, you can get a vial of “Super Male Vitality”, the herbal food additive that’s “the only Spagyrex processed male vitality support product on the market.”
After reviewing the individual herbal components in the original Super Male Vitality, we decided we could enhance the potency by using higher concentrations of some herbs while lowering the concentrations of other herbs. We also advanced our extraction technology to stabilize more of the active plant compounds and essential oils without oxidation, in order to enhance the natural support and strength of Super Male Vitality by a considerable amount.
With all those big words, it has to be real!
Donald Trump, pitchman
We all know about Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and all the other Trump-branded, superlative-laden products he’s built his image around hawking:
So it should be no surprise that his presidential campaign is being run in much the same way. For just $35, I can “activate my Donald J. Trump Elite Membership” and get a “Presidential Black Card”:
The text doesn’t even call out the thing that makes this clever (if at all) — the fact that it’s a “Trump card”, perhaps analogous to Hillary’s “Woman card” of a few months ago:
Which, sure, is pretty cheeseball, but c’mon — it’s a dollar. It’s not promising “membership” in anything “elite”; in fact it even says, in tiny type right on the card itself, “You’re in the majority.”
But the Black Card is something that lets you “claim to have been there until the very end”, for whatever value that has.
The email pictured below, with the “urgent midnight tonight deadline”, came in four days before the Black Card solicitation pictured above.
And the day before that:
The day before was the first mention of the Black Card, with no mention of a specific donation amount at all:
But if the Black Card and the Elite Membership isn’t for you, perhaps you’re more of an “Executive Membership” type:
What happens if you’re both an Executive and an Elite member? Which group do you board the plane with??
Or perhaps you’d prefer to join the “Board of Directors”:
It’s hard to read, but I think I can make out what it says…
In gratitude for your generous support of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign as a member of the Trump Board of Directors, and in recognition of your allegiance to our strong America First agenda, this certificate is hereby presented to [Your Name Here].
Thank you for your financial help, your patriotism, and your extreme gullibility. Suckers like you are why we don’t have to promise anything more specific than Make America Great Again.
Trump’s first fundraising email was sent out on June 21, right after he decided to stop “self-funding” his campaign. And since then, his emails (often multiple times per day) have been full of tactics instantly recognizable from junk mail. Like fake graphics:
Assurances that you, uniquely, are a special and treasured snowflake:
It’s nice to be thanked for my “steadfast support”, even though their tracking is sophisticated enough to know that no, I actually haven’t ever donated…
(Note that I was urged to “be the three millionth donor” on October 4, even though by the 15th, there are still only “close to 3 million” donors.)
Having your name on a list that gets shown to Trump is incredibly important, for some reason:
There must be a lot of lists floating around.
Oh dang! I made it onto the list!!
But my favorite has to be this one. Just cutting right to the chase:
Clicking “no” takes you to a page where you are urged to donate $100.
And the gifs! Oh, the gifs!!
So very scientific.
So, is this typical?
Here’s an important question to ask: Is this junk-mail approach actually specific to Trump? Or is it just the way people send out fundraiser emails?
I can honestly say that Hillary’s campaign emails don’t do this. They are indeed full of appeals to “chip in to show you have her back before the debate,” things like that. But they don’t include faux graphics or offer “Executive Memberships.”
Bernie — who sent out a lot of emails — didn’t play those games either. His emails were typically long and policy-heavy, but I only saw a faux graphic once (an animated contributions-coming-in-now gif that’s no longer on their server).
The bit about adding your name to a list that the candidate promises to gaze lovingly at is from Jeb!’s playbook — perhaps others as well. (Of course, Jeb! only asked for a dollar for the privilege.)
No, the junk mail tactics reminded me of only one other candidate: Cruz.
This is garbage:
This is garbage:
This is garbage:
And this is patent garbage: Fake subject line, fake (spoofed) from: address, and weird “personal email/privileged communication” framing device for…what reason?
It’s clear that conservative media thinks its consumers are stupid. They need to be tricked. They’re elderly, and won’t be able to see through this dumb stuff. (In fact, Ben Carson’s campaign was almost certainly wholly a fundraising scam against the elderly from the get-go. I checked — his percentage of funds raised from people who listed their occupation as “retired” was nearly double that of the other candidates.)
So why are so many smart people falling for Trump? Some probably hate Hillary, and Trump says he also hates Hillary, so Trump’s their champion on the hating-Hillary front.
But others just want to believe that what he says is real. That Big Pharma really is holding back miracle cures they don’t want you to know about. Because the alternative — Treatment A, with all its well-known side effects — is scary and unpalatable.
But what Trump’s saying when he says “We’re gonna build a wall” is just “We have advanced our extraction technology to stabilize more of the active plant compounds and essential oils without oxidation.”
It’s just marketing babble designed to sell us something that is not truly intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
It’s just junk mail.
