Back in the early 90s, due to budget cuts I lost my first real job out of college and for the first time in my life, I was unemployed. A baseball teammate of mine suggested that I go with him to a meeting that could be a way for me to make extra money: selling water filters.
Some of you reading this probably know exactly what I am talking about. The presenter at the meeting wasn’t very good, and he didn’t do a good job of explaining how the whole thing worked. Was I selling water filters or recruiting? Why was I told I would need to buy all this stuff in order to market these? My friend and I left unconvinced.
This was a classic multilevel marketing (MLM) scam. The thing is, given how desperate I was, if the presentation was better, there is no guarantee I wouldn’t have been sucked in. This was a thing on my mind while my wife and I were traveling to visit my mother-in-law in Ohio because we were binging season 1 of the excellent podcast The Dream.
In 11 episodes, host Jane Marie, of This American Life fame, takes a deep dive into that particular world. This is already a seven-year-old podcast, so season 1 was in 2018; however, it is still quite relevant. One thing in particular that makes it such a timely listen is the deep, deep connections of one Donald Trump to the MLM world.
You probably are aware of how Trump’s former Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is full of MLM money, as part of the DeVos family that gave the world Amway. You might even know of how deeply the industry has had its claws in politics, including even Bill Clinton, who promoted Amway while president. But nothing matches Trump’s background in MLMs.
Bridget Read of The Nation outlines exactly how deep Trump’s MLM connections go, including running two scams himself.
In 2016, they helped elect Donald Trump, himself the face of two multilevel marketing companies founded in the 2000s. One was a dietary supplement MLM called Ideal Health rebranded as “The Trump Network,” and the other was ACN, an Internet and phone service MLM for which Trump served as a spokesperson. In 2017, he installed Richard DeVos’s daughter-in-law, Betsy DeVos, as education secretary—who that year alone raked in at least $8 million from Amway’s holding company. The industry rejoiced: One shareholder in Herbalife, which had recently been fined $200 million by the FTC for misleading its participants, was sure that what little enforcement had impeded multilevel marketing would be killed for good. “We are in a post regulatory world,” he crowed in an e-mail after DeVos was confirmed.
The industry’s influence did not end with Betsy. Jay Van Andel’s daughter, Barbara Van Andel-Gaby, is the chair of the Heritage Foundation, of which Jay was a founding trustee, and to which the family has given millions. When she inducted the current Heritage president into office in 2021, Van Andel-Gaby promised that he would “ensure that our unprecedented influence on Capitol Hill continues.” Shortly after Trump was elected again, that promise was largely fulfilled, as Elon Musk set about enacting much of Project 2025, Heritage’s plan for a second Trump term. Via DOGE, he has targeted nine of the federal agencies the group hoped to see gutted, including the Education Department, which Betsy DeVos had previously pledged to eliminate as secretary. (Members of the DeVos family including Betsy gave Musk’s pro-Trump PAC at least $12 million in 2024.)
I see her point about how Herbalife might be a better comparison of Trump’s presidency than any authoritarian, because the nature of MLMs is kind of authoritarian. First off, only a tiny percentage of people make any money, 1 percent according to the Federal Trade Commission, although AARP found that to be somewhat higher. But still, most people lose a lot as they are suckered in.
And this is another parallel to the Trump/MAGA world. The people who are suckered in often are desperate folks who are at their financial wits’ end. In addition, religion is often used as a ploy to draw people in – if you are familiar with the concept of Prosperity Gospel, you can see how this works. If you are a good enough and work hard enough, the Lord will reward you. This scam draws in people to MLMs, but it also draws people to Trump. He knows this because he’s done it before.
I am not judging folks who end up getting grifted into Mary Kay and being scammed out of money because they are worried about paying the electric bill, or other financial worries. The episode of The Dream that went to a LimeLife convention demonstrated this. LimeLife, a MLM based around makeup that’s sort of a modern version of Mary Kay, has this annual event where people attend hoping to find tricks to get their failing LimeLife business off the ground, and be inspired. Instead, they hear from others who are desperate as they are, and tell stories about why they are doing it in the first place, which includes trying to be able to afford a funeral for a dying loved one. It’s an incredibly grim listen.
Trumpism operates the same way. You are special, dear rural white person, and your financial straits are not really your fault, although Trump sometimes can’t hide his contempt for his working-class and low-income supporters and outright blames them. This is also part of the MLM strategy – any failure is not the company setting up a grift that drains you of money through hidden fees and forcing you to buy more and more stuff, but it’s because YOU didn’t work hard enough and might not be cut out for it so your failure is on you.
There’s also another unsavory side of this, in how it draws people’s friends and family into the grift. They are outright told to start with people close to them: Many of these companies refer to friends and families as “soft targets,” which is one hell of a way to think about your social circle. And once you exhaust them, the MLMs keep people hooked by making outrageous claims about the huge potential market right around each of their sellers – often making statements about how many potential customers there are (sometimes claiming there are millions) that don’t hold up to any fact checking or basica math. Sounds very…Republican, right?
Yet despite this, MLM companies keep luring victims to their scam. Just like Trump keeps his people hooked. This leads me to one final parallel between MAGA and MLM: The people who are pulled in often live in rural areas. These are places with limited social options and not much to do. This makes holding Mary Kay, or plastic container, or leggings parties very attractive to someone in, say, rural Michigan, the area that The Dream focused on for their story. It’s something to do! And also something you lose if you stop trying to sell second-rate products to your friends and family. The same thing applies to MAGA: for some, even if Trump kills their first-born, leaving the cult of Donald means the end of their social life.
It’s really not good, and a big example of how certain aspects of our society are way more damaging than people realize.
The last word goes to Hurray for the Riff Raff.
