It’s easy to belittle and dismiss Trump, but I think there is a real method behind the madness with him. At last as far as how to connect with his base and win votes. The man has zero idea about economics or diplomatic relations or basic statecraft, but he has basically pioneered a whole new winning electoral communications strategy.
The secret behind his success is that he has realised that with the American voters’ increasingly short attention span; social media and bite-sized news; and historically low trust in politicians amongst American voters, he no longer need to be limited in any way, shape or form in terms of consistency of messaging, even within the same speech. And his particular style of talking is especially useful in that regard, because let’s be honest, who here has actually been willing and able to subject themselves to watch through a full Trump speech from beginning to end?
Essentially his strategy is to jam as many sound bites and pronouncements as possible into his speeches, with silly folksy anecdotes and asides liberally scattered throughout to keep things interesting and to help his listeners forget what he said 5 mi. It doesn’t matter if many of the points are mutually contradictory or won’t all be popular with his base, just so long as he doesn’t say polar opposites in the same breath, his team can just chop his one speech into dozens of clips all targeted at entirely different voter segments.
That’s how he has been able to amass and maintain his massive popular support. That’s how he won the presidency, because his opponents are still playing by the old rules of trying to draw Venn diagrams and crafting speeches to appeal to the most number of people as possible while also minimising the number of people they offend. That naturally sets a hard cap on how many people each speech can appeal to, and also make their speeches bland and essentially the same as every other speech crafted by the same industrial speech writers manufacturing industry.
While Trump has completely unburdened himself of any need for consistency or logic or even reality, and so he aims to appeal to everyone. It doesn’t matter if many of his supporters would literally rip each other apart if brought into the same room. That doesn’t matter, the only thing that matters is generating the maximum number of sound bites that are important to specific representative key voter groups. Everyone basically gets their own tailored, bespoke version of Trump who only says what they want to hear.
This is made possible and delivered by social media and targeted ads technology (which is why TikTok has been so persistently high on Trump’s agenda since taking office).
It’s an open secret that American social media companies have turned everyone’s smartphones into personalised spying machines recording conversations and sending back browsing history, shopping data and social media postings. American social media companies knows their users better than their users know themselves.
Even if you present Trump’s supporters with clips of him saying things they absolutely oppose, there is still a high chance they will still support Trump and insist the real clip is faked or taken out of context. And they can easily find any number of clips of Trump saying the exact opposite to convince themselves that he is still ‘their president’.
