There’s a good reason why TrumpAndOJ.com redirects to the Trump Organization’s website: The Trump Organization owns it.
According to domain analysis company DomainTools, the Trump Organization has owned TrumpAndOJ.com since October of 2007. The domain was registered under the Trump Organization’s general counsel’s email address, which is tied to over 3,500 other domains.
Online reputation management has grown into a multibillion dollar industry over the last decade. Preemptively buying up domain names of public figures to obfuscate provocative information is not a new tactic for celebrities and public figures, and Trump’s team appears to be one of the practice’s primary practitioners.
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After all, O.J. Simpson did attend Trump’s wedding to his second wife, Marla Maples, in 1993.
“I think everybody in the country believes maybe their relationship can work, if this relationship can work,” Simpson told Inside Edition at the red carpet for the wedding of Maples and Trump, who divorced in 1997.
Two months earlier, Simpson and Trump had mingled at the opening of a Hard Rock Cafe in New York, which produced a photo of the two smiling, ‘90s-era celebs. That picture went viral on sites like Twitter and Reddit when one of them was running for president last year.
Patrick Ambron, the CEO of the online reputation company BrandYourself, told The Daily Beast that hoarding incendiary domains for celebrity clients is de rigueur.
“I think celebrities and their representation are way more on top of this than politicians seem to be. It could be because [Trump] comes from a celebrity background, but he’s a little bit ahead of the game in this,” said Ambron.
The Trump Organization is no stranger to buying up potentially inflammatory phrases tied to the president’s name. The Trump general counsel’s email is listed as the proprietor of donaldtrumpsucks.com, voteagainsttrump.com (curiously purchased in April of 2012), trumpscam.com, and donaldtrumpponzischeme.com.
“You’re going down the list of the common ones that we’d get right away,” said Ambron. “They’re pretty savvy. They’re probably thinking of everything.”
The Trump Organization-held domains also reveal potential future plans for Trump products like the “Trump Network,” which are unveiled in thetrumpnetwork.com (as well as thetrumpnetworkpyramidscheme.com). It also shows off a potential expansion of Trump University into cities like Omaha (TrumpUniversityOmaha.com), Jacksonville (TrumpUniversityJacksonville.com), and Charlotte (spelled both TrumpUniversityCharrlotte.com and TrumpUniversityCharlotte.com).
Ambron pointed to several major domain mishaps in the 2016 campaign as proof that the Trump camp was years ahead of the game. CarlyFiorina.org famously redirected to a page showing 300,000 frowning faces, representing the number of employees she laid off in her tenure at Hewlett-Packard.
“It’s defense. It’s real estate. If somebody wanted to buy TrumpSucks.com later on, it makes it harder,” said Ambron.
The Trump Organization does not own TrumpSucks.com, which redirects to hillaryclinton.com.
In 2008, Trump told Howard Stern he considered O.J. Simpson as a potential contestant for his reality TV show The Apprentice, saying the disgraced football star “would’ve done the show” but that he “can’t go into details” about why it didn’t materialize.
“I know that if you come up with a cure for cancer, and if you put it on, and if it doesn’t get ratings, they will not broadcast it. So, you come with a cure for a disease? No good,” Trump said.
“Now, I know this: If I put O.J. on — huge ratings. Oh, forget it, 35 million people.”
