• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, October 22, 2024

This post begins with a MediaPost writer killing his own column about Donald Trump's McDonald's fry cook campaign event this week.

Specifically, it was a review of a 30-minute video on CSPAN of Trump making fries and serving McDonald's patrons from the drive-thru window -- which all in all, was a pretty cliched and harmless campaign stunt, especially compared with so much else Trump has been saying and doing on the campaign trail.

I was surprised that the writer killed his own first draft, which I never saw, but then sent me a revised version to see what I thought.

Mainly the piece was about what a nice and caring man and how authentic Trump came across as in the campaign video.

I told him I didn't agree with his assessment that this was spontaneous behavior for Trump and that it wasn't heavily pre-produced, but that I respected his opinion and that I didn't have a problem with him publishing it, because we welcome different opinions at MediaPost.

He decided not to. And I wondered why, even after I told him I didn't have any issue with it, he decided not to publish it.

I've been wondering a lot of things about my fellow Americans who have positive feelings about Trump, and over time I've concluded that it falls on a spectrum of varied reasons ranging from those who have genuinely bought into him and his whole schtick to those who simply support him for their own self-serving reasons, some of them pretty extreme and frightening.

I'm guessing you already have a good idea of how I view Trump. It's a view I held long before he got into politics, and it has only grown more pronounced every day I am exposed to him.

But this post isn't about what I think, or for that matter, what the MediaPost writer who killed his own column thinks. It's about what you think.

And by that, I don't mean the obligatory cadre of critical -- or even supportive -- voices who normally comment on my "Red, White & Blog" posts. I mean, the rest of you.

If you genuinely believe Donald Trump is a good and well-intentioned man who has America's best interests at heart, I'd like to understand why. You can post in the comments field below, or email me directly at joe@mediapost.com and I promise to keep what you share confidential if you want.

When I first began covering political media and marketing in the early 1980s, I had the good fortune to interview the late, great ad man Tony Schwartz who is known for creating what might be the greatest political ad of all time, LBJ's "Daisy" spot below.

When I asked him why it was so powerful and influential, Schwartz told me that the best ads -- heck, the best story-telling of any kind -- are the ones that tap into and unlock thoughts, feelings and underlying beliefs tucked away inside of us at an almost primal level.

It's a refrain I've heard from others over the years, and I think it's something many in the ad world believe to be true, that the best forms of persuasion are the ones that don't try to persuade us so much as tap into things we have already bought into.

What I'm trying to understand is how and why Donald Trump does that for you.