When Trump announced in 2015 that he was going to run, a friend of mine who is in the production end of television told me that he could win. Why? Because he knew how to ‘connect’ to an audience thanks to his TV show.
And what is clear to me now, in a way that it was never previously clear, was that politics has become how a personality appears in person or on a screen, regardless of what they say.
Take a look at this clip: MAGA Stumped When Asked A Simple Civics Question (youtube.com).
Does this woman have any idea of how stupid she sounds when she says that the Democrats are trying to turn the country into a Communist state?
And of course, she buys into every conspiracy theory about how the government fudges the numbers and is letting all these illegal immigrants into places they don’t belong.
Best of all, she knows for a fact that Joe’s just a figurehead being managed by Barack Obama who is the real President and will do anything to keep Trump from regaining the office that he not only deserves but had the office stolen away from him.
Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of Democrat(ic) voters out there who will also say anything to justify a vote for Joe, stolen or not. But the difference is that what you get from most no-brain Democrats is the same old, same about how we need to help the poor, we need to expand medical care, we need to tax the super-rich, and we need to do all the things that we should have done but didn’t do during the New Deal.
In other words, what most Democrats support is the idea of a ‘welfare’ state.
Now, it used to be the case that Republic(ans), on the other hand, didn’t believe in welfare because most of the people on welfare were either too lazy to work or were black, or were both. And this was the narrative which Reagan used to become the Godfather of the so-called conservative ‘revolution’ which basically got down to some snide comments about the ‘welfare Queen’ driving around town in her Cadillac.
That was the sum and substance of the Democrat(ic) – Republic(an) debate until Donald Trump came along. What Trump realized, and he was an innovator in this respect, was that social media would not only become the most popular, efficient, and effective communication technology for getting the word out to a wide audience, but it would also change political discourse to appearance rather than content.
You think that anyone who goes to a Trump rally and screams their head off gives one goddamn what Trump says or bothers to listen to what he says?
Know why Trump gets slightly better poll numbers than Joe? Because whenever he talks, maybe he’ll say something funny, or outrageous, or insulting, or nasty as opposed to Joe who gets up there and makes the same kind of boring, pleasant speech that politicians have been making since politicians started making speeches decades if not centuries ago.
I used to get offended at how Trump turned himself into a character actor every time he opened his mouth. But the good news is that all the other politicians are now doing some character acting and sooner or later someone will come along who does it a lot better than Trump.
And when that happens, and it will, Trump will quickly and completely disappear because if there’s one thing which entertainment media requires, it’s a new voice or a new face every now and again.
In December 2015, Huffington Post announced they were moving stories about Trump from the Entertainment page to the Politics page. He was originally covered in the Entertainment section because his candidacy, according to Arianna Huffington, didn’t represent “a serious and good faith effort to present ideas on how best to govern the country,
It’s now exactly eight years since Arianna made that comment about Trump. Would someone like to tell me how and when Trump ever made a ‘good faith effort’ to behave like a President of the United States?
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