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| Andrew Graham |
I remember attending that conference, though I don’t remember anything that he said. At the time, most people in the PR field knew of Trump as the ”current star of NBC's hit reality show,” as one PR trade outlet put it at the time. I knew of him as that, and also as a shady property developer who didn’t pay his bills, because the PR agency I was working an internship for at the time specialized in commercial real estate.
Today, Trump is known for other things. For being the only president to be impeached twice. For trying and failing to steal the last election. For being a convicted fraudster.
One way to think of PR is as a field that owns the domain of public opinion. What’s discrediting about Trump, to everyone who works in the communications field, is that he’s running not for president, but for dictator—and in dictatorships, companies don’t need to be accountable to public opinion at all, because they can exert their will through other means.
Reputations—which the many excellent professionals in the PR field work so diligently to improve or maintain—would cease to matter. Those in power would instead reward companies for writing big checks and making life difficult for their political opponents. Everything in business would either be paid-for or performative. It would be the absolute antithesis of the positive way our industry has evolved over the past generation. Cratering democracy means cratering our entire industry.
And this is to say nothing of the physical safety of hundreds of thousands of PR people, if Republicans win in November.
Authoritarians punish their critics loudly and publicly. That is literally one of Trump’s campaign promises.
The point is this: Every agency and PR pro working today is invested in the continuation of U.S. democracy. This election is a fight to preserve that democracy for another four years.
PR pros can do their part by working the refs. Mainstream press coverage of Project 2025 is not yet proportional to the existential threat that it poses. Political media needs to cover the stakes, not the horse race. Our field is one that directly participates in setting the media’s agenda, and we need to use that power to help ensure that every voter, in every state, knows what Project 2025 is by this November.
PR pros can also prod their employers to speak up. Agency owners and operators are well aware of what this year’s election means to their business interests, but many put up this facade of being “apolitical.” They need to do better—avoiding politics should not be an option when one side is so transparently trying to destroy democracy.
Employees should demand that firms support democratic ideals. That stance should be safe enough for even the most risk-averse firms while also helping the PR community do its part to help ward off the existential threat that Trump poses.
This November, it is not “Trump versus Vice President Kamala Harris” or “Republicans versus Democrats.” It’s “Fascism: Yes or no?” The stakes have never been higher.
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Andrew Graham is founder of Bread & Law, a public relations firm in New York City. He was the 2021 president of the Public Relations Society of America, New York Chapter.
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