No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

by Naomi Klein

The term “shock doctrine” describes the quite brutal tactic of systematically using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock—wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes, or natural disasters—to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called “shock therapy.”

The goal is all-out war on the public sphere and the public interest, whether in the form of antipollution regulations or programs for the hungry. In their place will be unfettered power and freedom for corporations. It’s a program so defiantly unjust and so manifestly corrupt that it can only be pulled off with the assistance of divide-and-conquer racial and sexual politics, as well as a nonstop spectacle of media distractions.

Trump’s cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires tells us a great deal about the administration’s underlying goals. ExxonMobil for secretary of state. General Dynamics and Boeing to head the department of defense. And the Goldman Sachs guys for pretty much everything that’s left. The handful of career politicians who have been put in charge of agencies seem to have been selected either because they do not believe in the agency’s core mission, or do not think the agency should exist at all. Steve Bannon, Trump’s apparently sidelined chief strategist, was very open about this when he addressed a conservative audience in February 2017. The goal, he said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (by which he meant the government regulations and agencies tasked with protecting people and their rights). And “if you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.”

As this has been unfolding, it struck me that what’s happening in Washington is not the usual passing of the baton between parties. It’s a naked corporate takeover, one many decades in the making. It seems that the economic interests that have long since paid off both major parties to do their bidding have decided they’re tired of playing the game. Apparently, all that wining and dining of elected officials, all that cajoling and legalized bribery, insulted their sense of divine entitlement. So now they’re cutting out the middlemen—those needy politicians who are supposed to protect the public interest—and doing what all top dogs do when they want something done right: they are doing it themselves.

A near-impenetrable sense of impunity—of being above the usual rules and laws—is a defining feature of this administration. Anyone who presents a threat to that impunity is summarily fired—just ask former FBI director James Comey. Up to now in US politics there’s been a mask on the corporate state’s White House proxies: the smiling actor’s face of Ronald Reagan or the faux cowboy persona of George W. Bush (with Dick Cheney/Halliburton scowling in the background). Now the mask is gone. And no one is even bothering to pretend otherwise.

What this model tells us is that the very idea that there could be—or should be—any distinction between the Trump brand and the Trump presidency is a concept the current occupant of the White House cannot begin to comprehend. The presidency is in fact the crowning extension of the Trump brand.

The main pillars of Trump’s political and economic project are: the deconstruction of the regulatory state; a full-bore attack on the welfare state and social services (rationalized in part through bellicose racial fearmongering and attacks on women for exercising their rights); the unleashing of a domestic fossil fuel frenzy (which requires the sweeping aside of climate science and the gagging of large parts of the government bureaucracy); and a civilizational war against immigrants and “radical Islamic terrorism” (with ever-expanding domestic and foreign theaters).

A large-scale crisis—whether a terrorist attack or a financial crash—would likely provide the pretext to declare some sort of state of exception or emergency, where the usual rules no longer apply. This, in turn, would provide the cover to push through aspects of the Trump agenda that require a further suspension of core democratic norms—such

Trump may have other reasons for upping the crisis level too. As the Argentine novelist César Aira wrote in 2001, “Any change is a change in the topic.” Trump has already proven head-spinningly adept at changing the subject, using everything from mad tweets to Tomahawk missiles.

We don’t go into a state of shock when something big and bad happens; it has to be something big and bad that we do not yet understand. A state of shock is what results when a gap opens up between events and our initial ability to explain them. When we find ourselves in that position, without a story, without our moorings, a great many people become vulnerable to authority figures telling us to fear one another and relinquish our rights for the greater good.

Here’s one thing I’ve learned from reporting from dozens of locations in the midst of crisis, whether it was Athens rocked by Greece’s debt debacle, or New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or Baghdad during the US occupation: these tactics can be resisted. To do so, two crucial things have to happen. First, we need a firm grasp on how shock politics work and whose interests they serve. That understanding is how we get out of shock quickly and start fighting back. Second, and equally important, we have to tell a different story from the one the shock doctors are peddling, a vision of the world compelling enough to compete head-to-head with theirs. This values-based vision must offer a different path, away from serial shocks—one based on coming together across racial, ethnic, religious, and gender divides, rather than being wrenched further apart, and one based on healing the planet rather than unleashing further destabilizing wars and pollution. Most of all, that vision needs to offer those who are hurting—for lack of jobs, lack of health care, lack of peace, lack of hope—a tangibly better life.

This book’s argument, in a nutshell, is that Trump, extreme as he is, is less an aberration than a logical conclusion—a pastiche of pretty much all the worst trends of the past half century. Trump is the product of powerful systems of thought that rank human life based on race, religion, gender, sexuality, physical appearance, and physical ability—and that have systematically used race as a weapon to advance brutal economic policies since the earliest days of North American colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. He is also the personification of the merger of humans and corporations—a one-man megabrand, whose wife and children are spin-off brands, with all the pathologies and conflicts of interest inherent in that. He is the embodiment of the belief that money and power provide license to impose one’s will on others, whether that entitlement is expressed by grabbing women or grabbing the finite resources from a planet on the cusp of catastrophic warming. He is the product of a business culture that fetishizes “disruptors” who make their fortunes by flagrantly ignoring both laws and regulatory standards. Most of all, he is the incarnation of a still-powerful free-market ideological project—one embraced by centrist parties as well as conservative ones—that wages war on everything public and commonly held, and imagines corporate CEOs as superheroes who will save humanity. In 2002, George W. Bush threw a ninetieth-birthday party at the White House for the man who was ...

In this sense, there is an important way in which Trump is not shocking. He is the entirely predictable, indeed clichéd outcome of ubiquitous ideas and trends that should have been stopped long ago. Which is why, even if this nightmarish presidency were to end tomorrow, the political conditions that produced it, and which are producing replicas around the world, will remain to be confronted.

The fact is, the US presidency impacts everyone on earth. No one is fully protected from the actions of the world’s largest economy, the planet’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the nation with the world’s largest military arsenal.

We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. “Beyond Vietnam,” 1967

That he won at all is the result of an electoral college system originally designed to protect the power of slave owners.

What Donald Trump’s cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires represents is a simple fact: the people who already possess an absolutely obscene share of the planet’s wealth, and whose share grows greater year after year—the latest figure from Oxfam shows eight men are worth as much as half the world—are determined to grab still more.

According to NBC News in December 2016, Trump’s picks for cabinet appointments had a staggering combined net worth of $14.5 billion (not including “special adviser” Carl Icahn, who’s worth more than $15 billion on his own).

There’s junk banker Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary, once chairman and lead investor in “foreclosure machine” OneWest, which kicked tens of thousands of people out of their homes after the 2008 financial collapse. There’s Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, the largest private oil company in the world. The company he headed bankrolled and amplified junk climate science for decades, and lobbied fiercely, behind the scenes, against meaningful international climate action, all while figuring out how Exxon could profit from a warming world. And there are also military and surveillance contractors and paid lobbyists who make up a staggering number of Trump’s defense and Homeland Security appointments.

It can be easy to forget, but before Trump’s election upset, regular people were standing up to battle injustices represented by many of these very industries and political forces, and they were starting to win. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly powerful presidential campaign, though ultimately unsuccessful, had Wall Street fearing for its bonuses and had won significant changes to the official platform of the Democratic Party. Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name were forcing a national debate about systemic anti-Black racism and militarized policing, and had helped win a phase-out of private prisons and reductions in the number of incarcerated Americans. By 2016, no major sporting or cultural event—from the Oscars to the Super Bowl—could take place without some recognition of how the conversation about race and state violence had changed. Women’s movements were turning sexual violence into a front-page issue, shining a spotlight on “rape culture,” changing the conversation about high-profile men accused of sexual crimes like Bill Cosby, and helping force the ouster of Roger Ailes from the top job at Fox News, where he was accused of sexually harassing more than two dozen women (allegations he denies). The climate movement was also on a roll, winning victory after victory against oil pipelines, natural gas fracking, and Arctic drilling, very often with resurgent Indigenous communities in the lead. And more victories were on the way: the climate accord negotiated in Paris in 20...

The Trump administration, far from being the story of one dangerous and outrageous figure, should be understood partly in this context—as a ferocious backlash against the rising power of overlapping social and political movements demanding a more just and safer world. Rather than risk the possibility of further progress (and further lost profits), this gang of predatory lenders, planet-destabilizing polluters, war and “security” profiteers joined forces to take over the government and protect their ill-gotten wealth. After decades of seeing the public sphere privatized in bits and pieces, Trump and his appointees have now seized control of the government itself. The takeover is complete.

In the face of his total lack of government experience, Trump sold himself to voters with a somewhat novel two-pronged pitch. First: I’m so rich that I don’t need to be bought off. And second: You can trust me to fix this corrupt system because I know it from the inside—I gamed it as a businessman, I bought politicians, I dodged taxes, I outsourced production. So who better than me and my equally rich friends to drain the swamp? Not surprisingly, something else has occurred. Trump and his cabinet of former executives are remaking government at a startling pace to serve the interests of their own businesses, their former businesses, and their tax bracket as a whole. Within hours of taking office, Trump called for a massive tax cut, which would see corporations pay just 15 percent (down from 35 percent), and pledged to slash regulations by 75 percent. His tax plan includes a range of other breaks and loopholes for very wealthy people like the ones inhabiting his cabinet (not to mention himself). He appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to head up a “swat team” stacked with corporate executives who have been tasked with finding new regulations to eliminate, new programs to privatize, and new ways to make the US government “run like a great American company.” (According to an analysis by Public Citizen, Trump met with at least 190 corporate executives in less than three months in office—before announcing that visitor logs would no longer be made public). Pushed on what the ...

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Trump presidency so far is the emergence of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s personal resort in Palm Beach, as a carnivalesque, members-only, all-for-profit “Winter White House” (it was even briefly advertised as such on state department websites). One club member told the New York Times that going to Mar-a-Lago was like “going to Disneyland and knowing Mickey Mouse will be there all day long”—only in this exercise in full-contact branding, it’s not Disneyland but Americaland, and the President of the United States is Mickey Mouse.

The book focused on a key moment in corporate history—when behemoths such as Nike and Apple stopped thinking of themselves primarily as companies that make physical products, and started thinking of themselves first and foremost as manufacturers of brands. It was in the branding—which manufactured a sense of tribal identity—that they believed their fortunes lay. Forget factories. Forget needing to maintain a huge workforce. Once they realized that their biggest profits flowed from manufacturing an image, these “hollow brands” came to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter who made their products or how little they were paid. They left that to the contractors—a development with devastating repercussions for workers at home and abroad, and one that was also fueling a new wave of anticorporate resistance.

The rise of the Superbrands, like the one Trump built around his brash persona, has its roots in a single, seemingly innocuous idea developed by management theorists in the mid-1980s: that to be successful, corporations must primarily produce brands as opposed to products. Until that time, although it was understood in the corporate world that bolstering one’s brand name through advertising was important, the primary concern of every solid manufacturer was the production of goods.

But by the 1980s, sales of classic brand-name goods like Tide, Levi’s, and Marlboro had begun to falter. The problem seemed to be that the market was flooded with nearly identical products and, with the economy in recession, many were making decisions based on price, not brand name. The old tricks—billboards, TV ads—didn’t seem to be working anymore; it was as if consumers had built up some sort of resistance. (Or, as ad executive David Lubars memorably put it, consumers “are like roaches—you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while.”)

At around this same time, a new kind of corporation began to rival the traditional all-American manufacturers for market share. These were the Nikes and Apples and, later, the Tommy Hilfigers and Starbucks and so on. These pioneers had a different model: Create a transcendent idea or brand surrounding your company. Use it to connect with consumers who share its values. Then charge a steep premium for products that are less about the objects themselves than about the profound human desire to be part of a tribe, a circle of belonging.

Many of these highly branded companies made the (then) bold claim that producing goods was only an incidental part of their operations, and that, thanks to recent victories in trade liberalization and labor law reform, they could have their products produced for them at bargain-basement prices by contractors and subcontractors, many of them overseas. It didn’t really matter who did the physical work, because the real value lay not in manufacturing but in design, innovation, and of course marketing.

The old-fashioned process of producing—running one’s own factories, being responsible for tens of thousands of full-time, permanent employees—began to look less like the route to success and more like a clunky liability. The goal was to become a hollow-brand—own little, brand everything.

The meteoric rise of this business model had two immediate impacts. Our culture became more and more crowded with marketing, as brands searched out fresh space and new “brand extensions” with which to project their big ideas and reach their target markets. Work and workers, on the other hand, experienced a sharp discounting and were treated as increasingly disposable.

But when journalists or consumers tried to hold the brand accountable, the company would almost invariably declare, “We’re as horrified as you are. Which is why we’re going to stop doing business with that contractor.”

So what does all this 1990s history have to do with Donald Trump? A great deal. Trump built an empire by following this formula precisely. And then, as a candidate, he figured out how to profit from the rage and despair it left behind in communities that used to do the kind of well-paid manufacturing that companies like his long ago abandoned. It’s quite a con.

In the nineties, that started to change, mostly because Trump had so mismanaged his Atlantic City casinos that his bankers were taking over more and more of his business, even before he had his first few bankruptcies under his belt. He didn’t lose total control over his properties, though. Investors appeared to be convinced that they needed the Trump name—his personal brand—to keep the house of cards from crashing down. And that proved an important lesson in the real-world value of a studiously promoted name.

Even though he was still primarily a builder, Trump had seen the way companies like Nike were making a killing on the hollow-brand model. And gradually, he followed suit. At the start, his innovation was that he branded a part of the economy that had never been branded before: high-end real estate. Obviously, there were global branded hotel and resort chains before. But Trump pioneered the idea that where you work (an office tower), where you live (a condominium), and where you play (your golf club or vacation destination) would all be franchises of a single global luxury brand. Much like Celebration, Florida—Disney’s fully branded town—Trump was selling the opportunity for people to live inside his brand, 24/7.

The real breakthrough, however, came when Mark Burnett, head of a reality TV empire, pitched Trump on the idea of The Apprentice. Up until then, Trump had been busy coping with the fallout from his bankruptcies and the impatience of his bankers. Now, out of the blue, he was being offered a chance to leap into the stratosphere of Superbrands, those rarefied companies earning their enormous profits primarily by building up their brand meaning and then projecting it hi...

Most importantly, with The Apprentice, Trump wasn’t paying, as other brands do, to have his brand featured in a hit network TV show; he was getting paid a fortune for priceless free advertising. More than that, his shows collected millions by promoting other brands. In April 2011, for example, The Celebrity Apprentice was paid to promote more products on the air than any other show, 120 product placements in all. This is the mark of a true Superbrand: Trump built a brand that contains brand multitudes. (And in bringing his children into the show, he even began to breed brands.) After you have pulled off a feat like that, what’s your next trick? Merge your brand with the ultimate symbol of power and authority: the White House.

He radically changed the core of his business: real estate. Rather than building and owning the structures himself, as he had earlier in his career, Trump realized that he could make far easier money simply by selling his name to developers around the world, who would use his celebrity to attract buyers and customers for their office buildings, condos, and hotels. The outside developers would do the construction and carry all the liabilities. If the projects failed (as they frequently did), Trump still collected his licensing fee. And the fees were enormous. According to the Washington Post, on a single hotel-condo project in Panama, “Trump has earned at least $50 million on the project on virtually zero investment.”

According to James S. Henry, a senior advisor with the UK-based Tax Justice Network, in 2015 the estimated private financial wealth of individuals stashed unreported in tax havens around the globe was somewhere between $24 trillion and $36 trillion. Gilded condos, with a flashy aesthetic pitched perfectly to newly minted oligarchs from Moscow to Colombia, fit the bill perfectly.

Trump won the White House on a campaign that railed ceaselessly against the loss of manufacturing jobs—the same kind of jobs he has outsourced at virtually every opportunity. As a businessman, he took full advantage of the outsourcing economy, as does Ivanka’s company. And, unsurprisingly, there have been major investigative reports detailing the appalling conditions under which Trump’s ties are made in Shengzhou, China, for instance, and the even worse conditions in the Chinese factories producing Ivanka’s line of footwear. In April 2017, the Fair Labor Association, a watchdog that grew out of the sweatshop scandals in the nineties, issued a report disclosing that workers in a factory in China producing for a major supplier of Ivanka’s dresses and blouses put in close to 60 hours a week, and earned what works out to a little over $1 an hour (well below the average wage for urban Chinese manufacturing workers). Most employees also lacked health and maternity benefits—not a good look for an advocate of women in the workforce.

Trump publicly defines his brand identity as quality and luxury. But that’s a sleight of hand: Trump hotels and resorts don’t even make it into the top ten luxury accommodation brands in the world, lists that reliably include names such as Four Seasons and Oberoi (as if to underline the point, Mar-a-Lago was cited for nearly a dozen food safety violations in January 2017).

Donald Trump’s personal brand is slightly different but intimately related. His brand is being the ultimate boss, the guy who is so rich he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and to whomever he wants (including grabbing whichever woman he wants, by whichever body part he wants). This helps explain why signifiers of Trump’s wealth are so important to him. Gold curtains and shots of his private jets are how Trump constantly reinforces his brand as the ultimate capitalist success story—power and wealth incarnate. It’s why he placed his personal wealth (however exaggerated) at the center of his campaign for president. It’s also why no labor scandal is ever going to stick to him. In the world he has created, he’s just acting like a “winner”; if someone gets stepped on, they are obviously a loser. And this doesn’t only apply to labor scandals—virtually every traditional political scandal bounces off Trump. That’s because Trump didn’t just enter politics as a so-called outsider, somebody who doesn’t play by the rules. He entered politics playing by a completely different set of rules—the rules of branding.

That’s a problem when applied to a sitting US president, especially because over many, many years, and with a startling level of consistency, Donald Trump created a brand that is entirely amoral. On the campaign trail, Trump was able to shrug off almost every conventional “gotcha.” Caught dodging federal taxes? That’s just being “smart.” Wouldn’t reveal his tax returns? Who’s going to make him? He was only half joking on the campaign trail when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” In Trump’s world, impunity, even more than lots of gold, is the ultimate signifier of success. This has grave implications for any hope of preventing this administration from acting as an open kleptocracy.

Every single minute he is president, his brand value and the value of his ongoing businesses is increasing, and he is therefore directly and significantly profiting from public office—precisely what conflict-of-interest rules are designed to prevent. So now we are in entirely uncharted territory, because let’s face it: human megabrands are a relatively new phenomenon. There’s no rulebook that foresaw any of this.

But what is striking about Melania’s now-settled lawsuit is that she seemed to be trying to skip the stage of actually launching a serious brand and instead went straight to claiming the money. Moreover those original court filings make plain how the Trumps see public office: as a short-term investment to enormously swell the value of your commercial brand in the long run.

Asked about these kinds of conflicts, Ivanka invariably stresses that just as her father has supposedly distanced himself from the Trump Organization by putting it in the hands of his sons (while he still collects the profits), Ivanka has put her company in the hands of “independent trustees”—her husband’s brother and sister (while she still collects the profits). This goes well beyond nepotism; it’s the US government as a for-profit family business.

And, of course, you might even get to meet the President himself, and have the chance to quietly influence him. (No public records are kept of who comes and goes from the club, so who knows?) For decades, Trump has been selling the allure of proximity to wealth and power—it is the meaning of his brand. But now he’s able to offer, to his paying customers, the real deal.

And this says nothing about the potential for corruption, which is dizzying. Given that what the Trump sons—Eric and Donald Jr.—are selling is ephemeral (a name), a buyer could pay $6 million for it or could pay $60 million. Who’s to judge what constitutes a fair market-value price? More worryingly, who’s to say what services are being purchased when a private company pays millions to lease the Trump brand? Do they really think it’s that valuable to their condo tower, or do they think that by throwing in an extra $5 million, they might be looked on more favorably in other dealings that require a friendly relationship with the White House? It’s very difficult to see how any of this can be untangled.

What’s fascinating about these ethics questions is that they are so similar to the scandals surrounding the Clinton Foundation, which may well have contributed to Hillary’s electoral loss. There were many thorny questions about what a private company or foreign government thought they were getting when they made a hefty donation to the Clinton Foundation. Were they being purely philanthropic, moved by the scourge of infectious diseases and childhood obesity? Or were they also making a calculation that their donation would pay some dividends because Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and looked likely to become the next US president? Those were valid concerns, and Trump didn’t hesitate to raise them about his rival. But with the money the Trump sons are collecting from leasing their father’s name, and the favors they are negotiating, the potential for influence peddling is of a different order: we now have money flowing to the family of a sitting president, not a projected president, and with not even the pretext of philanthropy, which the Clinton Foundation at least had. This is not to exonerate the Clintons—far from it. The decades Bill and Hillary spent blurring ethical lines at the Foundation are part of what set the stage for Trump to annihilate those lines altogether

Even if corruption (or treason) ultimately costs Trump the White House, what will be left behind will be wreckage—proof of the fundamental premise of Trump’s political project: that government is not just a swamp, it’s a burden. That there is nothing worth protecting. That private is better than public. And if that’s all true, why not wreck the place before you leave—figuratively if not literally.

It’s a reminder that Trump’s political career would have been impossible without the degradation of the whole idea of the public sphere, which has been unfolding over decades. It could never have happened without the idea that “government is not the solution, it is the problem,” as Ronald Reagan famously put it. And it could never have happened had that message not been followed up with decades of deregulation that essentially legalized bribery, with outrageous sums of corporate money flowing into politics.