Anyone with something to sell should by now have caught on to the new business model: claim to have been victimized by President Trump, and then … profit!
Don’t think for one second that E. Jean Carroll is doing anything more than hawking her new book. The rollout for it this week followed the standard marketing procedure for the book publishing industry (in which I worked for a year): Take a newsworthy portion of the work and place it in a reputable news outlet. And in the Trump era, “newsworthy” is now defined as does it reinforce the media’s narrative that Trump is a racist pig?
There is not a shred of reliable evidence to suggest that Carroll is telling the truth about having been raped by Trump in the mid-1990s in the fitting room of a New York clothing store. New York magazine ran an excerpt from her book wherein she recounts the allegation, graphically describing Trump as having pulled down her tights and penetrated her with his penis. The violent and turbulent episode took place, she writes, after she laughed and teased Trump throughout the entire Bergdorf Goodman department store, even after the two were in the fitting room.
The spread in New York magazine came with glamour shots of Carroll looking undeterred in to the camera. The story and her book have been covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.
That certainly can’t be bad for presales. And as described at great length in my own forthcoming book “Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People,” it’s the same marketing strategy deployed by Jussie Smollett and countless others.
Chicago police earlier this year accused the now-former Empire actor of staging a hate crime against himself by Trump supporters. Smollett, according to police, paid two gym rats to pretend to jump him on the street while shouting pro-Trump stuff. The purpose, police said, was for Smollett to raise his national profile and, in turn, get a boost in salary from the producers of his show.
It was an absurd ploy, but he knew that’s how things work now. Just make a bunch of noise about having been aggrieved by Trump on account of your skin color, gender, or sexuality, and watch the rewards pour in.
Smollett was, of course, found out, and although the corrupt state prosecutor’s office dropped the charges, a special counsel is now investigating what went wrong and may very well end up reinstating the charges. But his game follows the same formula we’ve seen time and time again.
Radio-based White House instigator April Ryan is nationally famous now after claiming to have been oppressed multiple times by Trump and his staff on account of her race. Since Trump has been president, the strategy has so far gotten her a book deal and a CNN contract.
Even before he was in office, professional victims in the media were cashing in on the Trump age. Now-former Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields in 2016, ahead of the election, claimed that she was pulled to the ground at a press conference by Trump’s campaign manger at the time, Corey Lewandowski. She wasn’t pulled to the ground; that was a lie. But she was sure to tortuously detail the melodrama in an upcoming book she had published under her name.
The technique could withstand the scientific method and become a new natural law: If you assert victimhood while factoring in race, gender, and sexuality, then use Trump as the invariant, the outcome tends toward more money and fame.
E. Jean Carroll has a book to sell, and her story is like Smollett’s — which is to say, difficult to believe and probably motivated by money and fame. That might be disgusting, but we’ve seen how well it works.
