TJ Walker describes how a Trump transition official falsely claimed Elton John would perform at the inauguration, then Elton John's team quickly denied it. He uses this to show how celebrities and small businesses can use spokespeople to avoid politically charged situations without personally antagonizing supporters.
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Earlier this week, a top member of the Trump transition team announced that Elton John would be performing at the inauguration. Oops. Turned out that wasn't quite confirmed. Elton John was not happy about this, but here's what he did. As you could imagine, Elton John's politics are not exactly in alignment with Donald Trump's. But Elton John didn't personally give a speech or an interview saying that he hates Donald Trump or wouldn't perform. What he did is have his spokesperson put out a short, very forceful statement. In answer to the question, you're saying wrong. Elton John will not, in all caps, not be performing at the Trump inaugural. So it was very short, it was forceful, and yet it was not wildly inflammatory. If you are an artist of any sort, it's perfectly fine to have politics, and that can be something important to you and important to a lot of your followers. However, it gets a little bit tricky if you want to say that you're never, ever going to perform in front of someone that you don't personally agree with on every single issue. That can be a little too much, that can harm artistic careers. Now, Elton John is wildly successful and is rich, although he did have a lot of financial problems not that many years ago. But still, does he necessarily want to have political enemies chanting or boycotting or screaming at his fans, or trying to harass his fans because they feel he's a part of a political agenda? I don't think so. So in that case, I think Elton John did exactly the right thing thing by trying to stop the rumor, by stopping it forcefully, but by not really getting his fingertips on it. This is one area where publicists spokespersons can come in handy because it creates a little separation between the individual, the celebrity involved, and the issue. It helps to diffuse tensions and it takes away some of the anger that political supporters on either side might have. So that's the real lesson here for the rest of us, is sometimes you may have customers or clients or people you deal with. They don't always agree with you. You have to figure out how public is the association going to be? Is it something you're comfortable with? And if you're not, how are you going to get out of the situation without causing a huge, huge political firestorm, eating up your time, resources and causing lots of headaches? One solution is to have a third party do it. A spokesperson, a PR person, maybe just another family member if you're a small family business. And sometimes you defuse it by just putting out a tweet. That way you let your own supporters people who know what you stand for, get a strong sense of what you're about, and yet you don't kick a hornet's nest. Now, the interesting side note to all this is the gentleman, Mr. Scaramucci, who's a part of the Trump campaign, who put this out, bills himself as a strong pro gay activist and points out, amusingly but correctly so, that this is the first president ever going into the White House who has embraced gay marriage going in. And it is interesting to think about how just a few short years ago, of course, Barack Obama, all the Democrats and Republicans, did not accept gay marriage. So public opinion has changed quickly and rapidly across the political divide on that issue. But apparently, there are other issues of concern to Elton John and many of his supporters.
