In his Aug. 1 Newsmax column, John Tantillo claimed to have just left the Democratic Party:
Since 1972, I have been a Democrat.
My first voting experience was for the progressive George McGovern, who lost handily to Richard Nixon.
My political heroes were FDR and JFK, who inspired me: Roosevelt for his concern for the average voter, and Kennedy for his youthful charisma that attracted many to him and the party he had chosen. Both figures with flaws captured my political choice, but recently, this has changed and led to my decision to move away from the party that brought me to dance.
The last straw was how they dealt with their political opponent, Donald Trump, by using the legal system to destroy his personal and political brand.
The double standard where Democrats and Republicans had different criteria for guilt was appalling to the fair-minded American.
[…]Other reasons for my exit from the party revolve around policies that affect the working-class constituents that the Demoractics [sic] have all but forgotten.
The most egregious is the inexperienced decision by the Biden administration to decrease oil production, that not only increased the price of oil for many Americans but added to inflation and the strengthening of Russia and Iran, along with other rogue oil-producing nations that have benefited from this flawed policy. This was implemented to appease Biden’s left flank, alienating the many Democrats once represented.
Tantillo is lying — oil production in the U.S. has increased under President Biden. But the bigger issue is that Tantillo seems to be lying about having ever been a Democrat, since his Newsmax archive dating back to 2017 shows no evidence of it. Here are some of the pro-Trump columns he has written, with an emphasis on his claimed specialty of branding and marketing:
- Trump Brand Benefits When Media Screams ‘Insanity’
- Alliance Between Romney, Trump Will Boost Both Brands
- Entrepreneur in Chief Is This President’s ‘Brand’
- The Power Behind President Trump’s Five Brand Tactics
- Critics Misunderstand and Underestimate Trump’s Marketing Genius
- Now Putin Can Be Trump’s Puppet on a String
- Trump Has Transformed the Republican Party — and Vice Versa
- Dems Fail to Realize Trump’s Secret Weapons: Marketing and Branding
- Trump’s New Brand as Carer-in-Chief
- Digital Marketing Is Key to Trump Landslide
- Trump Not the First to Use the Bully Pulpit
- Trump Must Ask Biden the Serious Questions Media Won’t
- The Trump Brand Can Become Even Greater
- Trump’s 2024 Winning Strategy: Vivek for VP
- Does Trump Need More Than Marketing to Win?
- Trump Needs These Three Things to Win
By contrast, Tantillo has largely been negative about Democrats in general and President Biden in particular:
- Jimmy Kimmel’s Political Punditry Damages His Comedy Brand
- Why Trump Understands Marketing — and Democrats, Not So Much
- Midterm Blue Wave Unlikely Due to Marketing (Tantillo was wrong about this; he later flip-flopped with a column headlined Democrats Won the Majority With Marketing)
- Obama’s Dubious New Strategy for the Midterms
- Pete Buttigieg’s Attack on Pence a Sign of Political Immaturity
- Dems Fail to Realize Trump’s Secret Weapons: Marketing and Branding
- Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s Brand Suffers From a Low Voter Ceiling
- Democrats Will Never Win by Being the Un-Trump Brand (one could say that’s exactly what happened in 2020)
- Trump’s Secret 2020 Weapon Is the Democratic Party’s Terrible Brand
- The Joe Biden Brand Problem and the Democrats
- The Democrat Brand Will Lose in 2020 — They Don’t Get Working Voters
- Impeachment Will Make Democrats a Niche Brand Most People Won’t Buy
- Biden’s Campaign Brings ‘Malarkey’ to New Low
- Should Joe Biden Quit?
- China is Biden’s Biggest Liability, That’s Why He Attacks Trump
- Trump Defined His Own Brand, Biden Must Learn From That
- Few Know the Harris Brand, and That’s Not Good
Tantillo also took a couple shots at Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, dismissing her in 2019 as “the social media flavor of the year” and argued that she was likely to lose re-election in 2020 (in fact, she won with 71 percent of the vote), later insisting that “AOC is not a political brand.” In 2020, we caught him attacking polls as biased toward Democrats because he doesn’t understand how they work.
Tantillo did admit in a June 2022 column, however, that Republicans have a branding issue because they are “perceived as being more extreme, less likely to govern honestly, and less likely to respect traditional institutions than democrats.” His solution for this was a “brand-over” to portray themselves as competent because “moving the argument from an emotional one to one rooted in logic only diffuses the perception that Republicans are extreme in their thinking.” In an follow-up column, he declared that the person to pull off this rebrand is … Vivek Ramaswamy.
Overall, though, Tantillo is at best a Newsmax Democrat (well, ex-Democrat) like Pat Caddell — claiming a Democratic mantle while sounding like a Republican.