When I was a kid in the 1970s, I was a huge rock fan. Aerosmith was one of my favorite bands. They put out a book in 1995 where everyone involved in the huge Aerosmith touring machine told their own part of the story. It’s possibly the most enjoyable book I’ve read because it makes me re-live those days in a way, and the book is quite funny and entertaining. (It’s called “Walk This Way”…I of course highly recommend it)
The book tells the story of the Aerosmith guys going from playing small shows to headlining Madison Square Garden within less than four years. They felt like they were conquering the world. Their sold out twenty-plus-thousand sized audience shows in seemingly every city in the U.S. made them feel everyone in the world was focused on them.
It didn’t matter that they weren’t actually meeting the people or getting to know what the people were all about. It didn’t matter that all of those people would go back to their normal lives the next morning completely removed from Aerosmith other than a memory of seeing their show. It didn’t matter that these people were a minuscule part of the population who were all in line with being a dedicated enough fan to go through the motions of attending the concert.
Aerosmith would swoop in on their own jetliner, spend a couple hours performing their craft, and then they’d leave. To them, everyone in the world was showing up, showing their support and enthusiasm and therefore, Aerosmith felt they were conquering the world. And what very young man, only so far living his life in a rock-n-roll bubble wouldn’t feel that way?
I felt that way within the little rock band I was in in Junior High after playing to a school gymnasium filled with maybe two-hundred people. But then I grew up. I went on to experience playing music to audiences of five or six-thousand people. But in my progression through maturity, I felt honored and appreciative of the audience’s appreciation of what our band was doing. I didn’t have the illusion that the whole world would then recognize me and adorn privileges upon me. I didn’t feel as though I was winning or conquering anything.
So to what maturity level must a seventy-year-old guy who’s only ever lived in his own bubble afforded to him only by being born to a millionaire understand that swooping into cities on his own jetliner, spending about forty-five minutes performing to a crowd of less than what Aerosmith attracted forty years ago, then leaving without meeting or getting to know anyone in that city need to reach before he doesn’t have the same illusion that a kid in a rock band has in that he’s conquering the world?
I’m lookin’ at you, Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has not been campaigning. He’s been putting on a rock tour (except it’s quite arguable that Trump ain’t rock). He’s got virtually no campaign infrastructure. He’s got no serious campaign staff, no real press secretary, no advisors on anything. He knows nothing about foreign policy for certain. He’s the embodiment of ignorance mixed with overconfidence. And that is a dangerous mixture.
Trump has so far gotten 11,536,494 votes in the Republican primaries of 2016. That’s 1/30 of Americans and about 5% of the registered voters. The Republicans have been breaking primary voter turnout records. But on average, about 62% of those Republican voters have turned out to vote against Trump.
Without going too deep into numbers and statistics. And without speculating on the final outcome of the election. I just wanted to point out that Trump has not been running a presidential campaign. He’s been running a Donald Trump Tour in the same way Aerosmith did in the 1970s. There’s no way of accurately measuring, but I would wager that there are many more Aerosmith fans in the country than there are Trump fans. And it is most likely that Aerosmith would lose big in a rating of UNfavorability the way Trump is.
In the general election, Mr. Trump may be in for a rude awakening. His campaign has reported they don’t have funds to run TV campaign ads in June or July. They’re counting on the RNC to fund their general election campaign, and provide campaign messaging and infrastructure after he is officially named their endorsed candidate at the convention. Normally that money and other help goes toward electing GOP candidates down the ticket because the presidential campaign has its own structure and funding.
Aerosmith didn’t have to be up on foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy, and they knew their audience and how to treat their audience. Sometimes cussing or being a bit profane was appealing to their huge, but relative to the whole population very small audience.
Mr. Trump is about to be catapulted into a whole different atmosphere. His current audience is arguably smaller than Aerosmith’s. But this new atmosphere will be an unknown audience to him.
His campaign claims that he doesn’t need to run TV ads because he has so much earned media. But so far that earned media is a result of him being outrageous in a microphone. That may work on a rock tour. But when he has to appeal to anyone other than the small percentage of enraged conservative extremists and white supremacists, it will be revealed that his audience will not grow to the size necessary to elect him to any office.
But I imagine Donald Trump’s brain will keep fueling his illusion of world domination similar to that of a twenty year old egotistical boy in a bubble on a rock tour.
