Marketing as Politics, And Trump The Grifter: Tales From An Election Year

Credits to all the Silver Age artists that ChatGPT scoured in order to produce this image.

If you’ve read some of my previous pieces, you probably know I spent time working in the trading-card industry in the 1990s.

That business then was a little like bitcoin is now, only with good, old-fashioned con artists playing the roles of tech bros.

Lots of money was made in those days printing pictures on cardboard and creating the impression of scarcity in order to drive up values.

I did some of that impression-creating, but I was also upfront about the fact that these are pictures on cardboard with no intrinsic value, and that the market bubble would eventually burst … which it did, of course.

Not everyone aspired to even that low bar of honesty. People from the strike-to-order coin business, the Currier-and-Ives-on-a-plate business, the 500-stamps-for-a-quarter business, the sell-seeds-by-mail business, the 99-cent-neckties-on-the-corner business – they all smelled the money and followed it, eventually to my front door.

A lot of them were grifters.

Merriam-webster.com says grifters are people who “obtain money or property illicitly, as in a confidence game.”

That’s as good an explanation as any for Kenny from New Jersey and his ilk, a few of whom have ascended to a modest level of legitimacy, if you consider online guitar auctions to be legitimate.

Some of these grifters were silver-tongued southerners; others were brass-balled city types with voices like taxi horns over squealing brakes.

I worked for a few of them. In some cases I didn’t know they were grifters until the checks bounced; in other cases I knew they were grifters but worked for them anyway because I enjoyed them and the work, even though I knew it was ultimately going to be pro bono.

The point is, I know grifters. And Donald Trump is a grifter.

Go back to that definition. Obtaining money illicitly? That sure sounds like Trump University or Trump Steaks or the current hustles of offshored watches and godawful-ugly sneakers.

A confidence game? That would be telling good, honest people that COVID will just go away or that all their problems will be solved if they just lock down the border and ship off anyone who doesn’t look like them.

That’s the old film-flam paradiddle, folks. It goes back to the Know-Nothings of the 1850s, if not before. It has roots in Huey Long’s “Every Man A King” movement of the 1930s – the last time a grifter took a prominent role in politics.

As I said, I don’t have a huge problem with grifters in general. If Donald Trump wants to sell watches and sneakers or trading cards with bits of his “game-used” suit, he can go right ahead.

But he shouldn’t do that and be president.

Grifters only care about the next hustle. That’s not a great fit for the office of president. Grifters can’t be trusted or entrusted with things like your grandmother’s pearls … or the nuclear codes.

Even if I didn’t think Trump’s policies were reheated fascism I couldn’t support him. I have too much firsthand knowledge of the subject and the subject matter.

And if you support him – well, every grifter needs an audience that believes you’ll have pie in the sky when you die, and you’re his.

I just hope I wake up the day after Election Day without a grifter for a boss … again. I’ve already seen how that movie ends.

As long as we’re on everyone’s favorite topic, let’s talk about politics and marketing.

I don’t mean political marketing and attack ads and all that happy stuff. I mean the politics of marketing.

Marketing is political. It’s a political act. You make conclusions on the world when you decide who you’re going to market to.

“Oh, great,” you’re going. “Politics shoved in somewhere else it doesn’t belong.” Hear me out.

If you ignore a socioeconomic group because you don’t think they’re worthy of your product or you’re afraid they might look down on your product or you just plain don’t want them to have your product, you’re making a political judgment. It’s certainly a business judgment, too, but it’s political in its implications.

If on the other hand you open up your product to all groups, that’s a political act as well, because implicit in that marketing decision is a need and desire to understand the lived experiences of all those groups and sub-groups, and that’s a really political act.

In fact, some people who aren’t marketers lump it under the heading of “Critical Race Theory.”

Many marketers take a political stance just by doing their job. Sometimes they even get called out for it, like when they dare to hire a trans spokesperson for Bud Light or celebrate Pride Week.

It’s helpful to not think of those occurrences as “marketing gaffes,” because that’s not what they are. They’re cases of marketers doing what marketers do, and people not understanding it comes from the same place as hiring a hat act to shill Ford trucks.

Of course, you can work in marketing, promote inclusion and diversity, engage in understanding lived experiences, and still vote for the candidates of a party whose candidates recite racist and misogynistic rhetoric. Folks live those contradictions all the time.

However, all sides need to understand that there is a contradiction at play. In many, many cases, the politics of inclusion is the business of marketing. It’s time we acknowledge that.

We’re nearing an inflection point where society’s inexorable surge toward all types of diversity is clashing with those in power who view a younger and more diverse society as a threat. Marketing is caught somewhere in the middle, along with a lot of us.

The difference is that marketing has the power to show us as we really are. And the more it does that, and the more it comes from a place of deep understanding, the better it will be at performing its core function and moving us all forward.

But can it move us far enough? Can it do what politics alone can’t?

I sure hope so.