An enduring myth about President Trump’s phenomenal 2016 campaign is that the whole thing was a lark, a stunt intended to do nothing but build Trump’s “brand” and make him more famous.
The only reason this tale persists is because it feeds into the media narrative that Trump’s victory was a freak accident and his supporters are a bunch of idiot patsies.
Howard Stern, who’s promoting a new book, pushed the fable further along during an interview Friday on CNN, citing “inside information” he has that gave him “no doubt” that Trump’s campaign was a “publicity stunt.”
He said Trump’s long history of flirting with a run for president, dating back to the late 1980s, started with the promotion of his self-help Art of the Deal book and then the 2016 bid was an effort to boost ratings for NBC’s “The Apprentice” and secure a raise from the network.
“What’s a better way to get NBC’s interest? ‘I’ll run for president and I’ll get lots of press,’” said Stern. “And I think that’s what happened.”
His memory, however, is inconsistent with history and even a little delusional in its logic.
Trump did say he was considering a run for president during the 2012 cycle, starting with a speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in February of 2011. That speech did come one month before the premier of the fourth season of “The Celebrity Apprentice” and Trump eventually did decline to run.
But in February 2015, at that year’s CPAC, Trump told me he was set to leave the show, the current season of which had already premiered the month before. “Yes,” he said when I asked if he was stepping away from the show. “It’s looking like it.”
That summer, NBC and Trump formally parted ways immediately following his notorious speech launching his candidacy. The next season of “The Celebrity Apprentice” wasn’t even scheduled to begin until December that year.
Michael Wolff made similar claims in his shoddy Fire and Fury book last year. He said that Trump had never intended to actually win the election and that the campaign was only meant to boost his “brand.”
As I laid out in my book Fraud and Fiction, that would only make sense if Trump’s “brand” had been “tacky, crude, xenophobe who alienates liberal Hollywood, the national media, all of the Democratic Party, and most of the Republican Party.” But prior to 2015, that wasn’t Trump’s “brand.” His brand was, and still remains, luxury hotels, high-end apartment buildings, and exclusive golf clubs.
If Trump’s master plan was to build his “brand” by turning all of his friends in New York, Washington, and Hollywood against him, while proposing the most crass policies imaginable — “build the wall,” “Muslim ban,” — and then intentionally lose a national race, he’s even dumber than Howard Stern thinks he is.
Stern doesn’t have any “inside information” about Trump’s 2016 campaign. He has a book to promote.
