Why Trump gets away with huge lies and Clinton gets trashed for little fibs
Jake Novak | @jakejakeny
Monday, 19 Sep 2016 | 1:45 PM ETCNBC.com
cnbc.com
excerpt:
So why is Trump getting a pass from the voters? No it's not because Trump is a man and Clinton is a woman. No, it's not because some powerful media types secretly want Trump to win. You'll start to find the real answer when you learn a simple legal rule that boasts a rare combination of enforcing free market fairness and understanding human nature. It's called "puffing," and that is the official term that legally protects salespeople and businesses from making boastful claims about their products and services that no one really expects to be provable by empirical facts. Legal protections for puffing are the reasons why you can't sue Snapple for saying it's made from the "best stuff on Earth," or go after Budweiser for calling itself the "king of beers." You get it, right?
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The voters are giving Trump much of the same kind of a pass for the same reasons. And Trump is helping achieve this result by making sure he maintains his salesman's image for as long as possible at every public appearance and interview. It's one of his many master persuasion skills. Even at his event last week where he was set to address the "birther issue," Trump pulled this maneuver and almost nobody noticed it. The marketing "experts" who saw the event noted that Trump was cunning to start the news conference by getting Medal of Honor winners and other top level military veterans to endorse him before he spiked the birther question so briefly by simply saying "Barack Obama was born in the United States, period." Some journalists were angry about it. CNN's John King publicly complained, "We just got played."
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The news media did notice the hotel comments; many of them even criticized Trump for the crass commercialism of it all. But what they miss is that Trump isn't actually selling his wares; he's changing the criterion with which we view him. Every time Trump mixes his salesman persona into the political arena he immediately puts himself into that less scrutinized salesman's role. It's why he gave the news conference at his new golf course in Scotland, it's why he talks so much about how he's still running his businesses, and it's why he launched his campaign from Trump Tower.
Sure, most of us don't like boastful salespeople, but it doesn't mean we won't buy what they're selling. Compared to the tough scrutiny his fellow Republican candidates and Clinton endure, the salesman standard is better. It's infinitely better. We don't fact check the commercials or the guys yelling in those commercials. Trump knows that. So, he's playing the role of that guy in the commercial. And you probably think it's gauche for a presidential candidate to be engaging in crass commercialism on the campaign trail. You missed the point.
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