Yesterday the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, delivered a major, 45-minute address to the nation.  Did it go out on any of the TV networks? No. It went out on Facebook.

The speech was nothing more than a repeat of all the various falsehoods that Trump has been slinging around about the so-called ‘stolen’ election. The event, which Trump claimed was the ‘most important’ speech of his entire life, got a 30-second blip on the CBS Nightly News.

              At the same time that this video was playing on a Facebook page, a so-called ‘grassroots’ rally was being held outside of Atlanta that featured speakers like Sidney Powell, who has been bumped off the Trump legal team, but is still peddling her crazy ideas about how the software used in voting machines is controlled by Chinese ‘thugs.’ When Attorney General Barr announced that his investigation couldn’t find any evidence to support this notion, he was denounced by alt-right media as a ‘liar’ and a ‘fool.’

              What’s going to happen the week after next is that Joe Biden will receive 306 Electoral College votes. On January 20, 2021 he’ll be sworn in as the 46^th President of the United States. These two events will provide a new class of digital entrepreneurs with the ammunition they need to grow a market which first appeared in 2016.

              And who was the guy who first created this new market and worked it to the point that it has become a significant source of revenue for him and others as well? A guy named Donald Trump. His campaign combined massive digital messaging with equally massive public rallies, the latter being used in place of door-to-door campaigning which Republicans don’t do.

              Remember the Fuller Brush man? Remember the kid selling the World Book Encyclopedia? You probably don’t, but I do. Selling a political candidate is no different from selling anything else.

It’s easy to do a Get Out the Vote (GOTV) campaign in cities where people live one on top of the other. It’s not so easy to do GOTV in rural areas where residents are more dispersed.

Who lives out in the country? Republicans, that’s who. So why drive all over the place to hit a house here and there when you can show up at a tent revival or a county bar-b-que and meet everyone at the same time?

              The other innovation that Trump brought to the political scene was to market himself and his brand all the time, whether there was an election or not. In the olden days, political campaigns started up every other year after the World Series. So, in a 24-month span, you were made aware of elections for maybe two months.  

              Beginning December 1, 2016 until the day before the 2020 election, Trump’s campaign held more than 120 large, public events, although they tended to be scaled down somewhat with the spread of Covid-19. The rally held outside of Atlanta yesterday was an exact lookalike of a Trump rally, including the crowd breaking into ‘lock him up’ chants from time to time.

              The only problem with the Atlanta rally, however, was that it was organized as a protest against the Governor of Georgia, who happens to be from the GOP. Another target was the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, who’s also a Republican even though he certified the election results for Kammie and Joe.

              This situation has created something of a problem because Trump is going down to campaign for the two Senate Republican candidates who are facing two Democrats in the runoff election being held on January 5^th. How do you denounce the electoral process as corrupt but meanwhile tell your people to go and vote?

              The difference in messaging between Trump on the one hand and ‘Stop the Vote’ rallies on the other tells me that political campaigns have become nothing more than a new market which may have a significant potential for growth. There were 127 million people who voted in 2016.  The total in 2020 was 154 million.

              That’s not a new market?