Trump won the White House on a campaign that railed ceaselessly against the loss of manufacturing jobs—the same kind of jobs he has outsourced at virtually every opportunity. As a businessman, he took full advantage of the outsourcing economy, as does Ivanka’s company. And, unsurprisingly, there have been major investigative reports detailing the appalling conditions under which Trump’s ties are made in Shengzhou, China, for instance, and the even worse conditions in the Chinese factories producing Ivanka’s line of footwear. In April 2017, the Fair Labor Association, a watchdog that grew out of the sweatshop scandals in the nineties, issued a report disclosing that workers in a factory in China producing for a major supplier of Ivanka’s dresses and blouses put in close to 60 hours a week, and earned what works out to a little over $1 an hour (well below the average wage for urban Chinese manufacturing workers). Most employees also lacked health and maternity benefits—not a good look for an advocate of women in the workforce.
The construction of many Trump-branded hotels and towers has been plagued with similar controversies, in the US and abroad. An investigation by Vice, for instance, revealed that the treatment of migrant workers constructing a Trump-branded golf course in Dubai stood out even in a city notorious for slave-like labor conditions. Ben Anderson, who produced the report, describes worker dorms in which “guys live 21 to a room with rats running around above them” and bathrooms that “didn’t look fit for human beings.”
The Trump Organization issued a statement about its “zero tolerance policy for unlawful labor practices at any project bearing the ‘Trump’ name.” Needless to say, this particular project was being built by an outside company; Trump had just leased his name.
Some brands would have been badly battered by these types of revelations. The Trump Organization just shrugs them off. And that has everything to do with the big branding idea around which Donald Trump chose to build his empire.
Immune to Scandal
Trump publicly defines his brand identity as quality and luxury. But that’s a sleight of hand: Trump hotels and resorts don’t even make it into the top ten luxury accommodation brands in the world, lists that reliably include names such as Four Seasons and Oberoi (as if to underline the point, Mar-a-Lago was cited for nearly a dozen food safety violations in January 2017). The truth, which doesn’t sound nearly as glamorous, is that the Trump brand stands for wealth itself—or, to put it more crassly, money. That’s why its aesthetics are Dynasty-meets-Louis XIV. It’s why Trump’s relationship to gold is the inverse of Superman’s relationship to kryptonite: Trump crumples when he is more than three feet away from something big and shiny.
Donald Trump’s personal brand is slightly different but intimately related. His brand is being the ultimate boss, the guy who is so rich he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and to whomever he wants (including grabbing whichever woman he wants, by whichever body part he wants).
This helps explain why signifiers of Trump’s wealth are so important to him. Gold curtains and shots of his private jets are how Trump constantly reinforces his brand as the ultimate capitalist success story—power and wealth incarnate. It’s why he placed his personal wealth (however exaggerated) at the center of his campaign for president.
It’s also why no labor scandal is ever going to stick to him. In the world he has created, he’s just acting like a “winner”; if someone gets stepped on, they are obviously a loser. And this doesn’t only apply to labor scandals—virtually every traditional political scandal bounces off Trump. That’s because Trump didn’t just enter politics as a so-called outsider, somebody who doesn’t play by the rules. He entered politics playing by a completely different set of rules—the rules of branding.
According to those rules, you don’t need to be objectively good or decent; you only need to be true and consistent to the brand you have created. That’s why brand managers are so obsessed with discipline and repetition: once you have identified what your core brand is, your only job is to embody that brand, project that brand, and repeat its message. If you stay focused, very little can touch you.
That’s a problem when applied to a sitting US president, especially because over many, many years, and with a startling level of consistency, Donald Trump created a brand that is entirely amoral. On the campaign trail, Trump was able to shrug off almost every conventional “gotcha.” Caught dodging federal taxes? That’s just being “smart.” Wouldn’t reveal his tax returns? Who’s going to make him? He was only half joking on the campaign trail when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” In Trump’s world, impunity, even more than lots of gold, is the ultimate signifier of success.
This has grave implications for any hope of preventing this administration from acting as an open kleptocracy. But as we will see in the next chapter, there are ways to pierce Trump’s brand bubble. You just have to know where to place the needle.
CHAPTER TWO
THE FIRST FAMILY OF BRANDS
Donald Trump may never have thought he had a chance of winning the White House; very few people did. But after he won the Republican nomination, he clearly realized he had the ultimate branding tool within reach: the US presidency. Every single minute he is president, his brand value and the value of his ongoing businesses is increasing, and he is therefore directly and significantly profiting from public office—precisely what conflict-of-interest rules are designed to prevent.