A little more than a decade ago, I wrote that Trump only has one claim to expertise: He’s expert at running direct marketing scams. Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Ties. It’s a long list, littered with lawsuits, that comes straight from the dusty trunks of advertising legend John Caples.
Somewhere along the way he figured out that American politics was the biggest potential direct marketing scam of all time. You can raise all the money in the world, you could promise the rubes anything, AND YOU’D NEVER HAVE TO DELIVER A PRODUCT! Even better, as a legally protected form of First Amendment expression (so sayeth the Supreme Court) political fund raising is even safer than other forms of direct marketing.
Pretty clearly, Trump’s most signal accomplishment was engineering a hostile takeover of the Republican Party’s fund raising mechanism. (His nonspending and misspending of those MAGA Inc. funds contributed significantly to their losses last week..) And as atrophied as his intellect is, his pineal brain genetically understands that if the Repubican Party continues as a going concern, it will begin to siphon those dollars back.
Hence my thesis: Just as it was Trump’s goal to take over and take private a political party’s fund raising mechanism, it is in Trump’s interest to have that party remain so weak that the money will continue to flow directly to him.
The use of political party fund raising mechanics for personal gain wasn’t entirely original with Trump. Richard Vigeurie, the conservative pioneer of political direct mail marketing, figured out large parts of it 60 years ago, as did a giant chunk of right wing preachers. But they at least made a play to get pols elected, not ejected. Trump’s lizard reflex was seeing the connection between the weakness of the suckers who succumbed to him and the size of his offshore accounts.
Randall Rothenberg is a former media and marketing reporter, advertising columnist, and science and technology editor for The New York Times; CEO emeritus of the IAB, the digital marketing industry trade association; and the author or co-author of several books on politics and media, including It Takes Chutzpah: How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change, with U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (Grand Central Publishing, 2025).
