Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election. In a landslide.
How did he do it? And what will it mean to the country?
First, how did President-elect Trump pull off this triumph? He used three levers. Lever number one is publicity.
Trump began to seek publicity 50 years ago. His mentor, the mastermind of the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s, lawyer Roy Cohen, got Trump into the publications of one of Cohen’s clients, newspaper and TV station owner Rupert Murdoch. Twenty years later, Rupert Murdoch would create Fox News. And would make Trump its biggest star.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump did every controversial thing he could to chase headlines. By the early 1990s, Mr. Trump was so successful at making it on front pages that his deeds were featured in late night comedians’ jokes, the ultimate marker of fame.
Then, because Mr. Trump was so famous, British TV producer Mark Burnett—creator of the landmark reality series Survivor–fashioned a reality show around The Donald, a show that, according to Burnett, created what he called an “illusion” of Mr. Trump as a business genius. That show persisted for fourteen years and 192 episodes. Accompanied by the usual non-stop Trump headlines.
The result is that Donald Trump is arguably the most famous man on earth. And that fame brings Mr. Trump billions of dollars’ worth of free press coverage every year. Even those who hate him have become addicted to reading the latest headlines about him.
Kamala Harris, on the other hand, only started her national press visibility when she ran for president in 2020, a mere four years ago. And her job as vice president was to stay out of the headlines and focus all eyes on Joe Biden.
So when it comes to press exposure, Kamala’s tiny Starfighter of publicity was facing off against Donald Trump’s massive Death Star.
Then there’s a central trick in publicity. A trick of which Donald Trump is the master. It’s the Parrot Principle. The Parrot Principle is simple. The more times you repeat a message, the more people will think it’s a truth. Even if it’s not.
For example, a month ago the high-prestige British magazine the Economist ran a cover story saying that America’s economy was the envy of the world. In 2022, Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine had made oil expensive in Europe, causing inflation from one end of the earth to the other. Said the Economist, America had beaten down that inflation faster than any other Western nation.
Added the Economist, in the years after Covid, America’s economy had grown faster than the economy of any other Western country. What’s more, in America unemployment was at astonishingly historic lows. And wages were going up.
But Donald Trump and his chorus of 147 supporters in Congress and the Senate said over and over again that the American economy was a disaster. And repeating something over and over again makes it true in the public mind. Even if it’s false. That’s the Parrot Principle.
And the Parrot Principle took us to the point where Mr. Trump was able to say in his TV ads, “Kamala Harris broke it. I will fix it.”
So publicity and the Parrot Principle are two secrets to Donald Trump’s victory. There’s a third.
In his book After the Ivory Tower Falls, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Will Bunch says that the true underlying battle in American politics is not a struggle between women who want abortion and men who don’t. It’s not a struggle between globalist elites and American patriots. It’s a tug of war between Americans who have gone to college and Americans who haven’t.
Bunch’s insight was backed up by two other books on the college-educated, non-college-educated divide. In that stand-off, the college-educated are a small minority, 38%. Those without a college education are a beefy majority—62%.
Donald Trump has surfed the tidal wave of discontent from the non-college educated more successfully than anyone you and I have seen in our lifetimes.
So what will Donald Trump do with the power the American people have given him? Will he unite us, as he promised in his victory speech at Mar-a-Lago?
Trump also swore in that victory speech that his motto will continue to be “promises made, promises kept.”
Will Mr. Trump follow through on his promise of the biggest mass deportation in history? Will he follow through on his promise of punishing the people he calls vermin, the Democrats who disagree with him, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, perhaps you, and presumably me?
Will he abolish the civil service and replace its two million employees with people loyal only to him?
Will he smooth the way for Elon Musk to land Americans on Mars by 2029, the end of Mr. Trump’s upcoming term?
And will the expulsion of immigrants and high tariffs on imported goods lead to an economic crash?
Or will Donald Trump be able to deliver on J.D. Vance’s victory-speech promise of “the greatest economic comeback in American history”? And will Mr. Trump be able to deliver on his own promise of a new American golden age?
We shall have to see.
References:
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-victory-speech-full-transcript-1981234
https://economist.pressreader.com/the-economist/20241019
https://thehill.com/business/4715951-world-bank-impressive-us-economy-is-powering-the-world/
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/4938528-donald-trump-the-apprentice/
Ramin Setoodeh, Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass, Harper, 2024
Grossmann, Matt, and David A. Hopkins. Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2024. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/polarized-by-degrees/73B3136DC05749099EB07787A48FE522
Bunch, Will. After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It. William Morrow, 2022.https://cmc.marmot.org/Record/.b65577036
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-mass-deportation-program-cost/story
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2024/11/06/trump-shy-voters/76090725007/
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on the highest-rated overnight syndicated talk radio show in North America, Coast to Coast AM. Bloom’s new book, coming out in February, 2025, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is wrong. For more, see http://howardbloom.net.