Brent Budowsky: Trump the loser

A great truth was told when Elizabeth Warren launched her critique of Donald Trump on Monday, branding him a loser. In her Twitter offensive, the senator labeled Trump an insecure narcissist with a list of failures in business who often demonstrates a problem respecting women and is — she repeated multiple times in tweets — a loser.

Trump’s frenzied counterattack against Warren -— similar to his virtual stalking of the highly regarded Fox News host Megyn Kelly ever since she asked him during a debate about his string of insults against women, which she professionally quoted verbatim -— reveals what it takes to make Teflon Don melt under intense scrutiny.

{mosads}When Fox spokeswoman Irena Briganti called Trump’s bizarre attacks against Kelly “his extreme, sick obsession” she hit the nail on the head. Similarly, when Warren launched and executed her hardball move to brand Trump as a loser she, too, hit the nail on the head.

Our two key words for today are “brand” and “loser.”

What Trump does is endlessly repeat the same insult against an opponent and let the media repeat it endlessly until it sticks to his target. In advertising this is called branding. It gave the world “little Marco,” “lying Ted” and “low-energy Jeb” to which I add today “Trump the loser.”

Warren began, and every Democrat seeking a 2016 landslide victory should promote, an aggressive branding campaign bonding together the words “loser” and “Trump.” This would be particularly powerful when executed by prominent Democratic women, because it would combine branding strategy with psychological pressure against Trump, who has difficulty dealing with strong, competitive and assertive women.

A “Trump the loser” branding strategy would weave undisputed facts into a compelling narrative that voters understand.

When Trump the loser created businesses that went bankrupt, he turned workers and investors who trusted him — as Caesar trusted Brutus — into victims who lost their jobs and money because they believed in him.

When Trump the loser makes money from sales of clothes made in low-wage China and complains that wages for Americans are too high, those deals helped make China great, not America. In his low-wage deals on foreign-made clothing, Trump was a friend to American workers the way Benedict Arnold was a friend to the original tea party patriots.

When repeated polls show Trump the loser being overwhelmingly defeated by Hillary Clinton and by Bernie Sanders, his contagious losing will turn GOP members of the House and Senate into losers for having to defend or support him. When he falsely claims numerous polls show him defeating Clinton in November, Trump the loser becomes Trump the liar.

When Vladimir Putin toys with Trump’s vanity by praising him, Trump the loser reciprocates by praising Putin effusively even when he is asked about rumors that the Russian strongman has ordered the murder of journalists.

When Trump tells The Washington Post the day before a terror attack in Brussels that NATO is not as good a concept as it used to be, and that he is afraid of starting World War III by opposing Russian aggression in Ukraine and Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, Trump the loser would make Putin and Chinese aggressors the winners. No wonder more than 100 Republican national security leaders warned that Trump is unfit to be commander in chief.

While Trump the loser spent more than 20 years praising  Clinton — as recently as 2012, when she was finishing her tenure as secretary of State, which he then praised with admiration — he now claims he did so because he was an influence-peddling businessman currying favor with her.

When Trump the loser keep his tax returns secret, is this the public relations equivalent of a witness taking the Fifth Amendment on grounds of self-incrimination? Perhaps the self-proclaimed great dealmaker doesn’t want voters to learn some details about the deals he brags about so often.

Elizabeth Warren is right. Trump is a loser.

Budowsky was an aide to former Sens. Lloyd Bentsen and Bill Alexander, then chief deputy majority whip of the House. He holds an LL.M. in international financial law from the London School of Economics. He can be read on The Hill’s Contributors blog and reached at brentbbi@webtv.net.