Salvage the brand

Trump tries to salvage the brand

The Republican nominee ditches the campaign trail to hawk his new hotel and to talk up his executive credentials.

By Eli Stokols and Louis Nelson

With 13 days until Election Day, Donald Trump tried Wednesday morning to simultaneously burnish his business and political brands, both of which are badly tarnished.

Drawing more than 200 members of the media to his opulent new Washington, D.C., hotel for an “official opening” that comes more than a month after the property opened to the public, Trump framed the renovated downtown post office as a testament to his abilities as an executive.

“My theme today is five words: under budget and ahead of schedule,” Trump said (using six words).

Trump, who political forecasters now give just a 10 percent chance of winning the presidential election, is in a last-ditch fight to resuscitate his campaign and a business brand that has suffered from his presidential run. As Trump and his offspring lavished praise on themselves for completing the project, rooms at the hotel were being offered at $404 a night online, a discount of roughly 50 percent.

“Today is a metaphor for what we can accomplish for this country, the same kind of thing,” Trump said Wednesday morning. “I’m tired of the excuses from our politicians. I’m tired of being told what cannot be done. I’m tired of people asking Americans to defer their dreams to another day but really what they mean is another decade. We can achieve our dreams for this country and we can do so more quickly than anyone ever thought possible. There is nothing we cannot accomplish."

Eschewing the angry bombast and vitriolic attacks that define his rally speeches, Trump stood on a dais inside a packed ballroom agleam in gilded mirrors and crystal chandeliers and sought to strike a tone so uplifting and aspirational that it seemed a betrayal of his own campaign’s motto to make the country “great again.”

“The United States is great. It’s great. Its people are great. There is no task or project too great. There is no dream outside of our reach. Don’t ever let anyone tell you it cannot be done,” he continued, diverging somewhat from his campaign’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. “The future lies with the dreamers, not the cynics and the critics. Everywhere I go in this country, all I see is untapped potential waiting to be set free, and the biggest element of all is our incredible people.”

Trump’s decision to attend a ribbon-cutting at his D.C. hotel raised eyebrows, with the candidate’s time at a premium in the final stretch of a presidential race that, by his own admission, he is currently losing. He told the crowd he was heading straight to North Carolina following the ceremony in the hotel’s grand lobby, seemingly in recognition of complaints that the morning photo op seemed more about his personal brand than his campaign, which has sunk over the past week beneath the weight of myriad allegations of sexual assault.

Speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash in the lobby, Trump became testy when asked why he’s taking time out of his swing-state tour to hawk his hotel.

“I did yesterday eight stops and three major speeches, and I've been doing this for weeks straight. I left there for an hour and a half. I'm going to North Carolina right now and then to Florida, then up to New Hampshire,” Trump said flatly. “For you to ask me that question is actually very insulting, because Hillary Clinton does one stop and then goes home and sleeps, yet you'll ask me that question. I think it's a very rude question, to be honest with you.”

To any observer, the final stretch of Trump’s campaign is taking the form of an infomercial — a nightly Facebook Live “newscast” featuring Trump surrogates and staff launched on Monday — that is selling a product as much as it is a candidate and blurring the lines that delineate official campaign business and activities like never before. The appearance at the downtown Washington hotel, which came a day after a campaign event at his Trump National Doral Miami golf resort in Florida, was the fourth one Trump has made as a presidential candidate.

The ribbon-cutting had been billed specifically as a non-campaign event, even though it was listed on Trump’s campaign website. His campaign staff and advisers — including campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and former "Apprentice" contestant Omarosa Manigault — were in attendance at a news conference beforehand in the hotel’s presidential ballroom. The wireless password provided to reporters was “trump2016,” and an eight-page, color-photo pamphlet handed out at the event focused entirely on the hotel and made no mention of its owner’s White House bid.

While Trump was in Washington, D.C., his running mate, Mike Pence, was campaigning Wednesday in Nevada, a battleground state, and Utah, one of the country’s most reliably red states, where Trump has admitted that he is “having a tremendous problem.” Hillary Clinton, who has begun devoting more and more of her time on the campaign trail to boosting down-ballot Democrats, took the opportunity Wednesday morning to draw a contrast with Trump’s self-promotional show and to emphasize the hypocrisy of his anti-trade, “America first” message.

As she wound down her speech in Lake Worth, Florida, Clinton noted Trump’s appearance in Washington “to open a new luxury hotel.” Trump, she claimed, “relied on undocumented workers to make his project cheaper.”

“Most of the products in the rooms were made overseas, and he even sued to get his taxes lowered,” she continued, informing the crowd that at her next rally — in Tampa — she’d be appearing with José Andrés, the chef who pulled his restaurant venture from Trump’s Washington hotel in response to his caustic comments about Mexican immigrants at the start of his campaign last year.

Trump’s team has billed the project as evidence of Trump’s business acumen, with Conway remarking that “his under-budget, ahead-of-schedule hotel” would show the “the tangible accomplishments of Donald Trump.” Speaking to reporters before the event, Gingrich said anyone concerned that Trump’s visit to his Washington property was a distraction was missing the point.

“That's because they don't understand the message: It's under budget and ahead of schedule,” he said, repeating an apparent talking point for Trump surrogates. “That's a very important message because it means nothing in the current bureaucratic government tells you what a Trump administration would be like.”

But whether or not the hotel did in fact arrive ahead of schedule remains an open question. While signs on scaffolding outside the building billed the hotel as “coming 2016,” a news release from February 2014 for the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago said the Washington hotel was supposed to open in late 2015.

A modest but persistent protest outside the hotel, illustrative of how the property is seemingly attracting as many gawkers as it has paying customers, grew steadily as the event drew closer, with the crowd numbering roughly 150 by the time the event was set to begin. The protesters marched in a large circle, chanting, "What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now."

Taking the stage before her father, Ivanka Trump acknowledged the launch of a new brand, Scion, the corporation’s initial attempt to downplay the "Trump" brand that has always been definitional. She lauded her father but also credited others involved in the hotel’s development, including Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington, D.C.'s, congressional delegate and a Democrat. Norton supported the launch of the Pennsylvania Avenue project but did not attend Wednesday’s event.

Ivanka Trump was the only one of Trump's four children present to speak, and her remarks were also an effort in self-preservation and the salvaging of a personal brand as a successful and nonpartisan female entrepreneur after a campaign that she described as “one of the most interesting journeys of my life.”

In praising her father, she spoke of the countless Trump employees who have remained loyal over the years and support his latest venture. But in describing her father's vision when it comes to restoring old buildings, she also seemed to be imploring a broader electorate that largely views him unfavorably to see him differently.

“My father trained my siblings and me not to see things for what they are," she said. "But for what they could be.”