HE WHO TROLLS LAST… When Trump Tweets, the Left’s Outrage Machine Shudders.
Stephen Miller:
The anti-Trump group Grab Your Wallet called for a boycott of L.L. Bean stores, even though the company itself has offered no political position on Trump or anything else for that matter really. This is how it usually starts.
Suddenly, however, the left finds itself somewhat outmatched and ill-equipped, because now they are up against the most powerful pushback tool they’ve ever faced: Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
Trump took to Twitter on Thursday to announce his support for Linda Bean. “Thank you to Linda Bean of L.L.Bean for your great support and courage. People will support you even more now. Buy L.L.Bean,” he wrote.
He also mistakenly included the twitter handle of a lobster restaurant in Maine, thinking it was the LL Bean company hashtag. So they are having a fun day now as well. You can bet a handful of left-wing websites are trying to figure out where the restaurant stands on gay marriage.
Trump is a master at branding. It’s one of the few things he’s managed successfully over the decades. His product launches fail, but the name and the branding carry on, and it carried him to the White House. Republicans in the primaries had no idea how to counter it. Hillary Clinton had no idea how to stop it. Trump knows he can tweet out support of a company, or insult them, and cause their brand to rise in prominence, their stocks to fall in value.
The Obama campaign took his powerful personal brand, wedded it to Big Data, and the result was a permanent political campaign which the GOP never did figure out how to fully counter.
Trump has done something similar, but he runs his permanent campaign more like a guerrilla action — a social media version of Mao’s Long March.
UPDATE (From Glenn): A reader emails: “Just spent >$500 with them online. On stuff I really don’t need. But it felt so good. Haaaaa! Eat that, boycotters!”
Question: When do businesses start deliberately trolling the left to reap the additional business it generates?