Truth and The Music Man
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Truth is often the enemy of the music man. Truth exposes the cracks in the marketing message of political pundits, yet why are we leery of the truth? Bill Stierle and co-host Tom look at how people can choose to believe in a marketing message couched in familiar terms, even when it is in opposition to what is true. We take an unflinching look at how Donald Trump uses marketing and engagement to stoke the public opinion despite a losing legal battle and why people are often convinced by his message. Take a dive with Bill and Tom as they explore truth in modern times.
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Truth and The Music Man
Last time, we talked about outrage, fast-food language and things like that. Many things are happening that are making me think about marketing messages, getting messages to stick, what works, what doesn't, and the irony of some of those messages. Let's start there because I think it will be very intriguing and informative for our readers.
One of the things that our readers like to know about is how do we get communication to stick? How do we make it so that the reader is going to be like, “Tell me more, I'm a little more interested. How can I buy this thing now? What? I can afford it, but there are three easy payments? Maybe I can do it that way. I can put on a credit card? I can mortgage my house for this? That's fantastic. I can have the thing I want that I can't afford. I can have it now.”
Marketing messages and messages of engagement are necessary tools inside a capitalist system that needs to maintain relevance. It needs to eat more food. That food is ears, eyes, intention and impression. Anything to get engagement very much turns into The Music Man show or the Broadway show of, “Here's this town.” You brought up The Simpsons episode, and if you could tell people about that. Even the original The Music Man is a big part of this, which a lot of people don't know that musical, which dates us, but that’s the whole thing.
The Music Man is a story about a marketing and salesperson who descends on this unsuspecting Western Town. It's a setback in the Railroad Era. He's trying to sell and make money in this town. You don't even realize as you're watching it because it's a light-hearted, lot of songs and musical. It’s a fun experience watching this musical. There are a couple of different movies. There's the original version and a newer one that Matthew Broderick was the star of. He stirs up outrage in this town, over the youth, all their children, as they're growing up. This youth and how they're being corrupted, and he fabricates this concern that wasn't even there about playing pool in the pool hall, and that's the root of all their evil. The idea is to stir up outrage so that they will believe him in and buy whatever he's selling.
There was a modern take on this episode of The Simpsons. Can you believe The Simpsons is more than 30 years old? That show is still running. It's amazing. There was an episode called The Monorail, which is loosely based on The Music Man concept, where the salesman comes to town, stirs up outrage, and then convinces the entire town. They need to all contribute, dig deep into their pockets and pay for this monorail, which is somehow going to save them from whatever it is that he was telling them is their problem.
Before you know it, there's this song that is done like a musical where the entire cast of The Simpsons, the entire town, is singing and cheering for this monorail. That episode was written by Conan O'Brien before there was a late-night host. It's like their parodies and making fun of something very real that happens in America and in other places too, but all we know is America because that's where we are. That outrage and marketing messages and getting messages to stick is how you become the Pied Piper.
The hard part about this is that there's a line that ethical people take. They go like, “We're going to push this, but we're not going to cross this line,” and then there are lines that unethical people put, which is, “I will lie until I get the level of enrollment I need.” You can then send out a flyer to every American or German citizen and get them to believe anything you want through, “Saturation. Stay after it.” The idea of a political attack on a person, if Donald Trump plays a victim than anything that he's done wrong, he can be put in the category of a political attack. Whereas if anything, Hillary Clinton has done wrong. It's a political attack too. If we take a look at and comparison of an email server and the private texting that was going on between everybody, it's worse than that whole email server thing is.
Talking about unsecured, text messages are the least secure way to send messages.
It's anything to get engagement. All of Donald Trump's lawsuits are more about getting engagement to show that he is going to fight and counter-message the lawsuit. Even if he loses, it's money well spent. That's the thing that I want our readers to know. Even if somebody loses a lawsuit, it's money well spent as a marketing ploy that you can then say, “The course didn’t find for me, but they didn't look at all the evidence. They didn't weigh in my favor but that's because they didn't see X, Y and Z. You can buy my condo because they had it out for me.”
The person pulls off a criminal thing, “They have it out for me.” If you stay after the message and the person likes you, they'll believe you that somebody else has it out for them because there is an outside element. A lawsuit to gain a political advantage is something Donald Trump used in 1973 when they countersued the City of New York. It's marketing to the place of outrage that is, “What do we do about it? How do you counter-message that?”
I'd love to know that because clearly, Donald Trump's opponents are very bad at it. If you want to look at it for a moment in terms of Democrats and Republicans, the Republicans are much better at marketing messages, getting eyeballs and messages to stick to the Democrats. The Democrats are trying to sit in the place of moral high ground. Nobody cares in terms of what people are hearing and talking about. Like you were saying what these lawsuits with Donald Trump, he's been losing every little battle along the way with judges ruling against him, whether it's releasing of his taxes.
That validation that you're doing gives you confidence. It also gives the left confidence. He's losing every battle, but he's not. That's not the war.
The difference is what battle are you, or is Donald Trump fighting?
He's losing in the Court of Law, but he is not losing the court of public opinion. He's gaining strength by marketing messaging.
The same thing is happening with the subpoena over records in the January 6 Committee that the courts keep ruling against Donald Trump and saying, “No executive privilege resides with the current president, not you,” but all he's doing is like, “I don't care what they're saying.” He is dominating the headlines with his messaging.
It's weird. They pour the foundation and he puts the false building on top of it. The foundation is a lie, but now all of a sudden, you're looking, “There are walls here. There's a roof on it. It's made out of sticks, but who cares? That's the best building ever. It's tough.” All they've got to do is find an angle that they can play into and play off of. They will lean into it just to get the false marketing message of outreach.
I didn't realize it as we talked about setting up this episode of what we're going to talk about. We're talking about the metaphor of The Music Man. I didn't realize at that time that Donald Trump is the Music Man. It's obvious to me now, but at the time, it was more tough thinking about marketing messages, getting them to stick and all that. No. He's the one who has come into the town. He's the outsider coming in, tells everyone what's wrong with their lives. There's about rage and whatever he wants to sell you as a solution is what most people are going to get on board with.
Here's the million-dollar idea for anybody that wants to counter-program. I can see it now. The Lincoln Project puts out a video of a digitally replaced The Music Man with Donald Trump's being the Music Man does all those different messages.
Maybe they change the lyrics to modernize it to be whatever one of his actual battles.
You could do six different versions of that, of the different things. What will happen is I think it's like we're under a spell and curse of the pro and the con that goes with marketing, promotion and messaging. The spell is getting you to believe something for you to fall asleep enough in order to have loyalty. The curse is something that's going to scare the crap out of you, so that it moves you into inaction against something that's of your own accord if something of your own values.
If I tell somebody that Obamacare is good for them, but I tell them it's bad for them enough because I don't want to be known as one of those takers, but then gets cancer. They don't have the money to buy. There's no medical insurance for them, but they voted against their interest. The curses and spells work like that, and it's language-based. That's the thing to grab the whole of here.
It's interesting because I think if we stick with this curses and spells thing for a moment, and we think back to 2020, the virus is new, Donald Trump is talking about Operation Warp Speed, getting the vaccine created that's going to get us out of it and then he's not actually really selling the vaccine once it comes out.
“No. You can do it if you want to do it. Why do you have to do it? We're independent American.” By doing that, what does it mean to lose 800,000 lives? If you're a public servant. If you're going into government because it's about public service, you're serving the public and you have the opportunity to keep on message, even though it's not popular because it's in the best interest and it's a part of public service, that's hard.
Joe Biden is not the same kind of Music Man. It’s not that he can’t do that. He's a very informal person, interpersonal and he got the touchy-feely thing going. He does care for others, but that's not the trumpeter of the person saying a message that's adversarial every day during the Donald Trump administration. It was like, “What is the guy going to say next?” He made politics a game show. It's hard to break America out of that to go, “Government is not supposed to be a game show. It's a public service that we report on and appreciate it’s there.”
He's gotten us to stare at the floor at the foundation and saying, “The foundation is cracked.” “No, it's not crack.” “Yes, it's cracked.” “We can fix it later.” “Let's fix it now.” Do you see how dizzying that is? To break that, that’s one of the things we get to is, how do you talk about what does integrity, mutual respect and growth look like? What does it take to build a coalition or a cooperative group of decision-makers that doesn't rebuild the mansion but realizes that we've got to do something about our infrastructure? We've put it off too long in a lot of ways. We're struggling because The Music Man mindset is like a football coach that's inspiring a team to lose a game, so they have the first draft pick. It's not a good model.
That does not feel like what it is. Donald Trump put us in such turmoil as a country for five years, including when he was running. Highlight controversial, always talking outrage. It was like a game show. It wasn't meeting people's need for basic support and stability. Joe Biden was the candidate that was the opposite of that. The people who wanted to get off the roller coaster, but once they get off the rollercoaster, it may be pretty boring and not as exciting. It's not going to grab their attention button.
That’s why his approval rating is so low and boring because who wants to stare at cement and concrete drying? When Donald Trump is promising that you're going to put speckles in it and it's going to be the best cement ever, and you won't believe what will happen to this cement. Even though you're calling it five years, it's six with the insurrection.
He is still dominating headlines.
It's going to be seven with his legal cases, and then it's going to be another two years on whether or not he's going to run in 2024. We’re on the fast-food diet of language. We're being marketed in such a way that we're pounded and exasperated. Can't we just get somebody with integrity that can send a clean message in order to get to a place to talk to angry people that have been sent a message that wasn't truthful and wasn't honest?
What's sad is the Democrats and the Joe Biden administration, whoever you want to call out on the side that is not getting messages to stick, can get some skills, can hire some consultants, can learn what they don't know if they just had an awareness of how much this is killing what they're trying to do in serving people. They don't get it. They need someone to help manage their communications and messages.
More to come on how we get those messages up for. It's getting mutual respect, integrity, a common unity around the word America. What that America stands for and getting people to engage in the process of collaboration and cooperation in a new way, which is important.
Thank you for that. I appreciate it.
Thanks, everyone.
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