× Expand Oli Goldsmith

I started working in over-the-phone sales in early 2016. Back then, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was in full swing. During a series of sales technique meetings a few weeks into work, I was struck by the similarities between what I was told to do for my new job, and what I saw Trump doing as a candidate.

Once I noticed these patterns, I couldn’t un-see them. Even as President, Trump appears to have taken telemarketing strategies to heart as the best way to sell some outrageous ideas.

1. Social Proof

In psychology, “Social Proof” is a phenomenon in which individuals adapt their behavior to fit in with a larger group. In sales, social proof boils down to repeating some version of the phrase, “Everybody’s doing it.”

× Many people are now saying I won South Carolina because of the last debate. I showed anger and the people of our country are very angry! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2016

As a telemarketer, I was encouraged to make offhand references to my prospective clients like, “Sorry to leave you on hold, but we’re very busy this time of year.” The goal was to get the customer to think: “Other people trust this guy . . . maybe I should too.” Trump frequently uses the phrase, “many people are saying.” For example, “many people” say he won South Carolina because they are, like him, very angry; “many people” say “France isn’t France anymore” because of immigrants; and “many people” believe a wild theory about how “Iranians killed the scientist who helped the U.S. because of Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails.

× Many people are saying that the Iranians killed the scientist who helped the U.S. because of Hillary Clinton's hacked emails. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 8, 2016

Trump also uses social proof to perpetuate and normalize his fantastical beliefs, as when he claimed that furloughed workers “are the biggest fans of” the government shutdown, or when he insisted that “people don’t care” about his broken promise to release his tax returns.

His message: So many other people agree with me, it is reasonable that you should, too.

2. “Ask again”

When faced with a customer who would not agree to buy, despite being offered the best possible deal, we were instructed to never admit defeat. Instead, we had to keep picking rebuttals from a script until the customer hung up. (It’s no coincidence that sales is one of the professions with the highest concentrations of psychopaths—a lack of shame goes a long way.) Trump’s ability to hold firm to whatever unpopular thing he’s saying is case study in “ask again.” Take, for example, his comments on John McCain. When then-candidate Trump questioned McCain’s status as a war hero because he was captured, many pundits predicted the end of Trump’s campaign. When confronted with calls for an apology, Trump instead said his words were mischaracterized and quickly switched to a new criticism: “I think John McCain’s done very little for the veterans.”

Ezra Klein has called the President’s lack of shame a kind of “superpower.” When asked to correct a misstatement or issue an apology, Trump just keeps doubling down on his offense, trying to close the sale.

3. “Let Them Fill In The Blanks”

My manager said we should never outright lie about what we can offer. But he otherwise made it clear that was okay to let allow misunderstandings go uncorrected. For instance, if a customer asked if we would deliver our service on an unmeetable timeline, the salesman might respond by saying that punctuality is important to us. To the customer, it sounds like a yes, but it actually promised nothing.

Like a salesman abusing that gray area, Trump uses true statements to present an untrue idea, letting the listener fill in the blanks to reach an untrue conclusion.In his January 8 Oval Office address during the government shutdown, Trump made two true statements: Most heroin in the United States comes from our Southern border; and more Americans will die from drugs this year than in the entire Vietnam war. The implication is that if we build Trump’s border wall we will save a Vietnam War’s-worth of lives every year.

But the fill-in-the-blank conclusion is not true, because most of the heroin from across the Southern border comes in at legal points of entry, so a wall would have no effect; and most of the nation’s drug deaths are caused by prescription opioids, not heroin.Using true statements to convey a lie is remarkably effective, and Donald Trump wields this strategy masterfully.

4. Mirroring

One salesperson I worked with recommended using a common name (he used “Josh,”) adopting a regional accent, and otherwise “mirroring what was familiar,” in order to appear more friendly. He advised me to take on a customer’s characteristics whenever possible to build trust with prospective customers—even if it was all an act.

Near the end of my time as a telemarketer, I trained two new sales teams—one from Pakistan and one from Honduras. The Honduras team was more effective, and I discovered that most of the members had once lived in the United States. They knew how to make themselves sound like Texans and Floridians, in other words to “mirror” their potential clients. And that made them seem less foreign to the people on the phone, and therefore more successful.

To be fair, this is typical politician stuff: a candidate tweaking his or her accent when they speak in the South, for instance. Still, whenever I see Trump—the born-rich son of a New York billionaire—putting on a coal miner’s hat or honking on a semi-truck’s horn, I think of “Josh” the salesman, trying on a twang.

5. Fear

I was also encouraged to tell a prospective customer partway through a call that I had just learned that we could no longer do business due to lost availability. The customer would panic, dismayed at the missed opportunity. Then, I would manage to “find” one last option—assuming we could lock in the deal right away. The strategy is to make the customer feel momentarily unsafe and then quickly provide a solution—even though you manufactured the fear in the first place.

One does not have to look far to find examples of Trump using this technique. He sounded an alarm about migrant caravans barrelling towards the border, then vowed that the danger would go away if voters elected a Republican Congress. His nonstop advocacy for the border wall operates on the same premise: Give Trump what he wants and you can eliminate the false threat he has conjured.

Trump is in our ear every day, telling us how lots of people agree with him, no matter how outrageous the statement, and that he’s making decisions just in time to save us from some new terrible threat.

He may be a lousy President but—and many people are saying this—he is a terribly good telemarketer.