Nir Kossovsky

Opinion contributor

President Donald Trump got to the White House riding the support of a stable 40 percent of still-approving voters for whom the most visible manifestation of “making America great again” would be a wall on our southern border. The president made that symbol the single most tangible part of his brand, and he did so very effectively. But now that his supporters expect it and his reputation depends on it, the wall is like his Alamo. He has no choice but to stand his ground and fight to the bitter end.

To him, the media’s opinions don’t matter, the Democrats’ opinions don’t matter and the opinions of more moderate, pragmatic members of his own party don’t matter. What he has learned from history and his own experience — in politics and business — is that if broadening your base means disappointing your core audience, it can lead to reputational disaster. Whatever we may think about the policy implications of his actions or the position they put our country in, we should understand Trump’s reputational strategy. It has wide implications not only politically, but in the corporate world as well.

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My firm is in the business of insuring corporations against reputational crises and has analyzed thousands of scenarios. As large companies and professional risk managers are realizing, reputation is based on the degree to which reality is in sync with expectations. Setting expectations without an adequate plan for meeting them is a dangerous game. You may be able to build a brand and market your products around some new vision, but eventually, if you stumble, angry, disappointed stakeholders will make you pay a price.

Candidate Trump made a misjudgment that has been made by countless companies over the years. It wasn’t enough for him to cast himself as a tough businessman who would make better trade deals for our country. It wasn’t enough to posture as a skillful negotiator who could get a fractious Congress moving again. It wasn’t enough to say he’d put “America first” and end our entanglements in foreign wars. It wasn’t enough to promise he’d cut taxes and eliminate regulations on business.

Trump bet his brand on a wall he can't deliver

Like BP’s brand promise of being “beyond petroleum,” like GE’s “imagination at work” portrayal of solving the world’s problems, like Wells Fargo trumpeting its new ethical standards, Trump linked his own brand inextricably with the wall. Like those companies, he hadn’t thoroughly thought through what a commitment it meant, what expectations he would have to fulfill if elected, and how exactly he’d be able to deliver something he had no unilateral power to deliver.

And now, like Col. James Bowie and frontiersman Davy Crockett at the Alamo, Trump must fight this fight to the death. At the moment, despite criminal investigations, convictions and guilty pleas swirling around him and negative news coverage off the charts, 89 percent of Republicans still approve of the president's performance, according to a recent Gallup poll. They are sticking with him for now, but they expect a wall. Failure, which seems inevitable, will be reputationally fatal.

In the corporate world, there is often an event forcing stakeholders to see reality for what it is and realize that their expectations will not be met. For BP, it was the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill that killed 11 people in 2010. At GE, imagination gave way to reality as expensive acquisitions, poor performance and rising interest rates showed that management couldn’t actually deliver on its promises. At Wells Fargo, it was, well, one thing after another.

Failure to build the wall will have similar implications for the president. His base will recognize that he never had a plan — that when he said, “Mexico will pay for it, believe me,” he was conning them.

Dashed expectations for Trump allies and base

If the wall wasn’t funded with Republicans running Congress, how likely is it now? Democrats taking control of the House recognize that it's the president’s Achilles’ heel. Even Republican senators, who according to Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill privately believe he is “nuts,” likely appreciate that what is kryptonite to Trump can protect them in their respective primaries. They, too, will eventually abandon him, as pressure to reopen the government supersedes whatever pressure they feel from a weakened president. Like Caesar of Rome, his “friends” in the Senate may be his ultimate undoing.

The gap between expectations and reality is becoming hard for Trumpians to deny. Ann Coulter has angrily turned on the president for his failure to meet the clear and tangible expectation he himself set. Fox News pundits see the gap. Rush Limbaugh sees the gap. If conservative media and social media commentators begin to amplify this expectation gap as the wall failure becomes more and more clear, the president’s reputation among even his ardent supporters will crumble.

In May 2017, we used our business reputation risk algorithms to predict that events eroding the president’s reputation would sink him to a 40 percent level of support — a level that would hold steady until his base’s expectations are shattered, which we anticipate leaving him with a 25 percent level of support. All indications are that we are headed in that direction. Like Humpty Dumpty, the wall will be his (reputational) downfall.

Nir Kossovsky is the CEO of Steel City Re. Follow him on Twitter: @HuygensIAFS