Number 2 of NEWS 1130’s Top 10 of 2016

WASHINGTON, DC. (NEWS 1130) – There is no question about it: this year saw the ugliest US Presidential campaign in recent memory. Real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump defied the odds to win the White House.

Trump was one of 17 Republicans vying for the party’s presidential nomination. But no scandal, no gaffe, not even Hillary Clinton herself, could stop him from attaining his nation’s highest office. “I could shoot somebody and not lose any voters,” he famously remarked.

During a heated exchange in a CNN Republican debate, Jeb Bush pointedly told him he couldn’t insult his way to the Presidency. In one of his first political speeches, Trump famously called Mexicans “rapists” and promised to build a wall along America’s southern border. But none of it seemed to matter.

Come election night, even the pundits were in disbelief once his path to victory became clear. “It was Donald Trump versus almost all of the experts,” CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out. “And as of right now, it looks like Donald Trump was right.”

So how did he do it? We asked Lindsey Meredith, a Professor of Marketing at Simon Fraser University, for his thoughts.

How did Trump manage to not let anything get in the way of victory?

“Trump managed to pull off something all the marketing and political polling gurus in the world missed completely. What Trump found out was that there was a whole pile of roughly disenfranchised middle class Americans who were economically up against the ropes, basically lost their jobs, a lot of them in blue collar activities, and, frankly, unemployed, underfunded, and looking for somebody to blame. Trump came along, spotted that, and he nailed it. The funny part is, a whole pile of marketing guys, and hey I’m in there too, missed it as well.”

Marketing experts, pundits, and the media as well — it looked like Hillary Clinton was going to win this. What did she do wrong?

“Regrettably, Hillary didn’t do much of anything wrong, to be honest with you. She had a few bad breaks, no question about that. Certainly the email stuff went sideways, and that last release just prior to the election didn’t help, because that last FBI release about, ‘Oh gee, she was up to no good again,’ just kind of fed the Trump misinformation campaign that she really was crooked. You know what? It’s a shame. But if you yell something loud and long enough, a lot of people are going to buy it. Trump was smart enough to pull that one off as well.”

It didn’t matter what he said. He even said, “I could shoot somebody and not lost any voters.” And while he didn’t shoot anyone, he was basically right.

“The behaviour of Trump, the information that was released on Trump, from top to bottom, left to right, probably would have got anybody else in the whole country shot on sight. The fact this guy got away with it was truly amazing. Again, we’re down to a key issue: it’s a marketing syndrome. We refer to it in a very pejorative standard I won’t go into, but basically, ‘I hate everybody. Now I’m going to figure out who I hate the least. That’s the guy I’m going to vote for.’ Trump managed to lock into that and, no matter what he said, no matter what he did, you know what, they hated the other side even more, and, even though post-polling said ‘We don’t like Trump, we dislike the Democrats and we dislike Hillary Clinton even more.’ So the guy walked off with it.”

What do you make of the idea of him being the post-truth candidate that we live in an era where facts don’t even matter anymore.

“Well, the whole idea of factual misinformation… look, there’s a blessing and a curse. The social networking sites, the Internet brought us a town hall voice, I like to refer to it as, where consumers get to voice their opinions. Regrettably, a whole bunch of guys get to voice total misinformation and flat-out bloody lies and they get away with it too. But, because it’s on the Internet, gosh, looks like news to me. Trump was also smart enough to say the right things at the right time. So, you’ve got to give this guy some credit. Yes, he spotted the disenfranchised Middle America vote. He nailed it. He also said the stuff they wanted to hear. He talks about destroying NAFTA, cutting those under-cutting Canadian guys out of their jobs, bring them back to the US, certainly under-cutting those Mexican guys and tariffing them out of business, and getting all those jobs back in. So, you know, one of the best things a politician can bring is the whole concept of ‘It looks like I’m the messiah and I’ve got an answer for your problems.’ And if people are desperate enough, you know what, they’ll believe that kind of nonsense.”