Wall is Trump’s Alamo. This won’t end well.
He staked his brand and base on a risky promise
President Donald Trump got to the White House riding the support of voters for whom the most visible manifestation of “making America great again” would be a wall on our southern border. He made that symbol the single most tangible part of his brand. But now that his supporters expect it and his reputation depends on it, the wall is like his Alamo. He has no choice but to stand his ground and fight to the bitter end.
To Trump, the media’s opinions don’t matter, the Democrats’ opinions don’t matter and the opinions of more moderate, pragmatic members of his own party don’t matter. What he has learned from history and experience is that if broadening your base means disappointing your core audience, it can lead to reputational disaster.
My firm is in the business of insuring corporations against reputational crises and has analyzed thousands of scenarios. Reputation is based on the degree to which reality is in sync with expectations. Setting expectations without an adequate plan for meeting them is a dangerous game. If, eventually, you stumble, angry, disappointed stakeholders will make you pay a price.
Candidate Trump made the same misjudgment as countless companies. It wasn’t enough to cast himself as a tough businessman who would make better trade deals. It wasn’t enough to posture as a skillful negotiator who could get a fractious Congress moving. It wasn’t enough to say he’d put “America first” and end our entanglements in foreign wars. It wasn’t enough to promise he’d cut taxes and regulations.
Like BP’s brand promise of being “beyond petroleum,” like GE’s “imagination at work” portrayal of solving the world’s problems, like Wells Fargo trumpeting its new ethical standards, Trump linked his own brand inextricably with the wall. Like those companies, he hadn’t thoroughly thought through what expectations he would have to fulfill if elected, and how exactly he’d be able to deliver something he had no unilateral power to deliver.
And now, like Col. James Bowie and frontiersman Davy Crockett at the Alamo, Trump must fight to the death. Despite criminal investigations, convictions and guilty pleas swirling around him, 89 percent of Republicans still approve of the president’s performance, according to a recent Gallup poll. They are sticking with him for now, but they expect a wall. Failure, which seems inevitable, will be reputationally fatal.
In the corporate world, there is often an event forcing stakeholders to realize that their expectations will not be met. For BP, it was the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill that killed 11 people in 2010. At GE, expensive acquisitions, poor performance and rising interest rates showed that management couldn’t deliver. At Wells Fargo, it was, well, one thing after another.
Failure to build the wall will have similar implications for Trump. His base will recognize he never had a plan and when he said “Mexico will pay for it, believe me,” he was conning them.
If the wall wasn’t funded with Republicans running Congress, how likely is it with Democrats taking control of the House? Even Republican senators will eventually abandon him as pressure to reopen the government supersedes whatever pressure they feel from a weakened president. Like Caesar of Rome, his “friends” in the Senate may be his ultimate undoing.
The gap between expectations and reality is becoming hard for Trumpians to deny. Ann Coulter has angrily turned on Trump for his failure to meet the clear and tangible expectation he himself set. Fox News pundits and Rush Limbaugh see the gap. As the wall failure becomes more clear and is amplified by conservative media and social media commentators, Trump’s reputation among even his ardent supporters will crumble.
In May 2017, we used our algorithms to predict that events eroding the president’s reputation would sink him to a 40 percent support level (roughly where he is now) — and that this would hold until his base’s expectations are shattered, leaving him at 25 percent. All indications are that we are headed in this direction.
Like Humpty Dumpty, the wall will be his (reputational) downfall.