Credit: Kourosh Keshiri
Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. She is a board member of 350.org, and co-produced the 2004 film The Take about workers in Argentina turning a factory into a worker cooperative. Her new book is titled, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics And Winning the World We Need (Haymarket Books, 2017). We spoke by telephone in mid-June.
Q: Your first book, No Logo, is about branding. Can you talk a bit about Donald Trump as a brand?
Naomi Klein: What I’m trying to do here is to put Trump into some kind of historical context. No one book could do everything, but I think there’s a way in which Trump is so bizarre and extreme that there is a narrative that tends to emerge around him which treats him like an aberration, as opposed to a logical conclusion of a great many trends.
One of those trends that I explore quite in depth is the changing of corporate structures in the late 1990s to emphasize the selling of a brand as opposed to the selling of products. A lot of companies reorganized themselves so that they were primarily designed as marketing companies and the work of producing actual products was outsourced to a web of contractors and subcontractors around the world. Nike really pioneered this model—a global superbrand that didn’t own a single factory.
Trump came a little bit late to this as a construction mogul. He used to build his own buildings, but very quickly realized that there was more money to be made in just becoming a superbrand and the breakthrough for him wasThe Apprentice. It was just this huge platform where he was getting paid to promote his brand and his brand idea, of just infinite power through wealth, and this was particularly appealing to people at a time of economic precariousness. And the more precarious the economy becomes, the more the dream of making it to that secure class becomes appealing.
‘Trump is a rolling shock. Every day, there is some new shock. Today it’s the lawsuit, yesterday it’s Comey, and the day before that it’s whatever—there’s just an endless Trump show going on.’
The value of the Trump brand is increased every time we say the word Trump, and [becoming President] is worth so much money to theTrump Organization. So they’re launching new lines of hotels, they’re increasing fees at Mar-a-Lago. Sales of Ivanka’s brand, despite the boycotts, are apparently going up. So they’re profiting in just countless ways from the presidency, and this really goes beyond any kind of conflict of interest we’ve seen before.
Q: How does the concept you outlined in your book The Shock Doctrine play into what we’re seeing today with Trump?
Klein: I think what we’re seeing with Donald Trump is a different kind of shock doctrine. What I’ve written before is about a single sort of shocking event, a destabilizing event that creates a window to push through these very profitable policies while people are distracted.
Trump is a rolling shock. Every day, there is some new shock. Today it’s the lawsuit, yesterday it’s Comey, and the day before that it’s whatever—there’s just an endless Trump show going on. Some of it is designed by Trump, some of it is inflicted on Trump because of his avarice and incompetence, but all of it is distracting from this very methodical transfer of wealth that is the connective tissue between all of his economic policies.
Whether we’re talking about getting rid of the estate tax, a 15 percent flat corporate tax, or his tax on regulations and how that is going to enrich the corporate sector; whether we’re talking about his climate policies, which are a massive giveaway to the oil and gas industry, or his health-care policies, or what he’s doing with Social Security. All of it.
So much around Trump seems to be incompetent, chaotic—we hear these words all the time—but on the economic front, it’s methodical. And because we all have our eyes fixed on the Trump show, we are not following the money nearly enough.
Q: What is the danger in this?
Klein: I’m really concerned about what this configuration of characters would do if they had a major external shock to exploit. Something like the 2008 financial crisis or the horrific attacks in Manchester. The people around him— Steve Bannon, Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions—do not have strong respect for democracy. They’ve already shown their affection for authoritarian regimes that exploit states of shock, states of emergency, to attack democracy in their own countries.
And their policies make these types of shocks more likely. They’re deregulating the banks; that makes it more likely to have another 2008 crisis. They are antagonizing the Muslim World; ISIS described Trump’s travel ban as a “blessed ban,” because it helps with recruitment so much. So I think big shocks are more likely because of what Trump is doing, and we have to be prepared for all of the things on what I call the “toxic to-do list.” Trump talking about bringing back torture. Trump’s attacks on the press. His tweeting that he wants to bring in the “Feds” to deal with the “carnage” in Chicago. We can’t be complacent.
Q: And, as Trump provides the carnival show distractions, there’s legislation being passed and these agencies are being defunded or deconstructed . . .
Klein: And the military has a free hand. Trump is not interested in micromanaging the military, he has made that clear. So they have a free hand to use rules of engagement that are increasing civilian casualties. That’s just another example of this.
I don’t know how much of this is by design. Not all of it, by any means. I don’t think he’s that clever. But I think the reason Republicans are in no rush to impeach him is because so far this endless stream of distractions is serving an extreme economic agenda. I don’t think anybody can answer the question of how much he is a useful idiot or how much he knows what he’s doing, but it would be unwise to not give him any credit at all.
He inherited a real-estate company from his father but he became a celebrity brand by turning his own personal life, his extramarital affairs in the 1980s, into a live-action soap opera. And that worked for him. Other people would have been embarrassed to have their affairs on the front page of the newspapers. Trump loved it. I’m not saying this guy’s a genius, but I think it’s important to at least give him credit for what he does well, which is putting on a distracting show—understanding how to play the public.
Q: In the book, you look at some hopeful signs, including what occurred at Standing Rock. Why is this a reason to be optimistic?
Klein: I was lucky enough to be in the camps when Obama denied the permit to put the pipe under the river. It was an amazing day, but the folks there at the Sacred Stone Camp were immediately talking about getting down to the real work of getting to 100 percent renewable energy. Turning this community into really a showcase for the next nonextractive economy.
‘We need to manage our economies so that we grow in the areas that are not at war with life on Earth. We can expand the caring economies, health care, teaching, the arts, public interest media, these are all low- carbon professions.’
The camps were really a model for another way to live, another way to interact with each other. This was about corporatism and militarism and racism all at once. There was that integrated analysis of white supremacy, the history of white supremacy and colonialism, and corporatism, and then you have this militarized police enforcing all of it.
So I think that too often we put our issues against each other, and so much of the work on the left is now in these issue silos. So the integrated analysis and integrated solutions were really exciting.
Q: One of the things you talk about in this book, and also in This Changes Everything, is how the environment is a unifying issue, because it’s about the planet that we all live on. Could saving the planet be a window to our responding to Donald Trump?
Klein: The argument I made in my last book is that there is no way to do what is necessary in the face of the climate crisis without challenging the logic at the heart of capitalism, which is endless indiscriminate growth.
We need to manage our economies so that we grow in the areas that are not at war with life on Earth. We can expand the caring economies, health care, teaching, the arts, public interest media, these are all low-carbon professions. We can create huge numbers of good jobs, and we should fight to make them unionized jobs if we want to build bridges with the labor movement and break this terrible history of pitting jobs versus the environment.
Q: You include the Leap Manifesto, a Canadian statement on the environment and social justice, as an appendix in this book. Tell us more about that.
Klein: It is an attempt by people to come together from many different sectors and lay out a vision of the economy that we actually want. We launched this project in the middle of our last federal elections, and I think this is part of a trend we’re seeing—not waiting for politicians to say, “We’ve figured it all out,” but grassroots movements drafting their own platforms and then saying to the politicians, “If you want our support, you need to endorse this vision.”
We launched this platform because we were in the middle of an election campaign and none of the major parties had a platform that we felt was ambitious enough to rise to this moment of multiple, overlapping crises: climate change, inequality, racial injustice, indigenous human rights violations, the outrageous treatments of immigrants and migrants. So we told this different story, trying to connect the dots between many of these issues.
And now that document sort of has a life of its own. People in different cities are taking it, rewriting it, localizing it, running local candidates for municipal elections. We’ve been getting a lot of interest from people as far away as Australia, to do their own Leap-like projects. And there’s a growing interest in the United States.
Q: If, as you say, no is not enough, what should people start doing when they finish reading your book?
Klein: Well, look, “no” is not enough, but we are still going to have to be engaging in those nos. If there’s a white supremacist march in your community, get out there and say no. And get out there into the openings created by Trump. Like in California, where people are now using the debacle of Trump’s health-care plan and Congress’s health-care plan to put forward single payer, universal public health care.
So move into those spaces. And save some time to dream. Save some time to get together with people who you are not in conversation with at the moment, and see whether it’s possible to come up with some common ground.