Donald Trump & the American Public’s Obsession with Perceived Honesty
By Jacob Garnjost
I’ve never been a big fan of Donald Trump. His floppy yellow hair piece and resting unimpressed face have never amused me. When I was younger I knew very little about “The Donald” other than his infamous catchphrase. “You’re fired” was the basis for my first creative celebrity impression, Arnold Schwarzenegger doing an impression of Donald Trump. Needless to say, I believed I was a world class entertainer and a valuable tool for my parents at slow moving dinner parties. As I grew older, I realized that this character of Trump was far more than a man who could seemingly crush a person’s spirits by uttering two words. Donald Trump was a mogal. A controller of business, money, and entertainment. And this man was also a bigoted jackass.
Just as a starting point here, let’s reflect on the fact that according to Forbes, Trump is worth $4.5 Billion. That’s a lot of money. The vast majority of Americans will never be worth $4.5 Million. I know I probably won’t be. So he’s an unrelatable figure. He never grew up in middle class America, so when he talks, he’s coming from the point of a rich entitled white dude. This is important to remember when people talk about how he speaks for the common man. He’s not the common man.
It is my firmest belief that there are three types of Trump supporters and to be honest all of them are pretty scary for the political process. I’m not here to say that all Trump supporters are stupid. They’re just sadly misinformed. But I digress.
The first type of Trump supporter doesn’t care about politics. They aren’t aware of the importance of something like a presidential election. That’s okay, because typically this group doesn’t get involved in the political process. This is their choice. The problem here is that this group of people have become involved in the political process, not because they have an understanding of the issues or the delicateness of a two party system in the three branches of government, but because they know this guy, Donald Trump. So will this person really vote for Trump or actively campaign for him? Probably not, but if you ask them “Who are you voting for?” They’re going to say Trump, because they know who he is and they think it’s funny. Unfortunately for the country and potentially the whole world, this campaign has gone far beyond the confines of a funny joke. Stephen Colbert ran for president as a joke. Trump is serious.
Part of the appeal of Trump are his ridiculous, racist, and sexist comments. It’s not the content of these statements, but the sentiment. People like to say things like “Trump speaks his mind” and maybe there is some truth to that. But if Donald Trump is speaking his mind, this only proves that he’s a huge idiot. This brings us to the type of Trump supporter that is the most interesting and complex. The “Trump is honest” camp. I can’t even count how many times I’ve been somewhere, or have been scrolling through Facebook, and heard the sentiment of “At least he’s honest, everyone else is a liar,” or even worse, “He’s just saying what everyone is thinking.” Just because someone speaks before thinking about what they’re saying, doesn’t make them honest, it just makes them a colossal dunce. Trump has started this war against the so-called PC culture. If your defense for saying something terrible about Mexican immigrants is that you’re not going to be politicly correct, then you shouldn’t be in front of cameras. Racism doesn’t become suddenly okay if you believe it. In August, Trump told a crowd in Cleveland that he thinks “the big problem this country has is being politically correct.” He followed up that nugget by saying “I’ve been challenged by so many people and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either.”
“Politicly correct” originated in America in the 1970’s as a term used satirically by the left and feminists to talk about the way culture attempted to define female sexuality. 20 years later it became a right wing tool to attack the so called liberalisation of the media. In 1991 George Bush even spoke out against “… a movement [that would] declare certain topics ‘off-limits’, certain expressions ‘off-limits’, even certain gestures ‘off-limits’…” Whether or not anyone actually abides by the so called rules of political correctness, it’s become a buzz word for censorship. And while the right would like to argue that they are the ultimate defenders of the First Amendment, they’re just as responsible for censorship as anyone else. They just attack people who make statements that contradict their own version of political correctness.
So why do people care that Trump is “the only honest candidate”? People don’t trust politicians. A 2014 Rasmussen Poll found that only 4% of people polled believe politicians keep campaign promises and a Gallup poll from just over a year ago shows that 81% of Americans trust the government “only sometimes or never” in regards to general decisions made. It’s ironic actually that the majority of the country doesn’t trust the media, yet the media is the exact cause of a world where people don’t trust our politicians. The 24 hour news cycle started by CNN in the 1980’s turns every minor scandal into a major breaking news story. Our distrust of politicians was born out of the Watergate in 1972 and only gets worse every time we have an Anthony Weiner. Now the aura of “honesty” that Trump has created around his campaign by saying anything that pops into his head, has created an army of people campaigning to bring truth and honesty back to politics, oh and obviously make America “Great” again.
The third and most fringe group of Trump supporters are the people that agree with all of Trumps bigoted BS. These people are scary. They think we should build a wall and that Megan Kelly shouldn’t moderate a debate for fear that her menstrual cycle will impede her ability to be fair to all the candidates. (And just for the record I think Megan Kelly is the worst, but this has everything to do with her show and her network and nothing to do with the state of vagina). Nonetheless, these terrible people exist. Should you be worried about this group? I mean probably, but not from an election point of view. This fringe part of the Republican party comes out every year to vote for the guy that’s the toughest on immigration and women. There’s not really much hope for swaying them from their stance. The others? Maybe there is hope for them to see that the clown in front of them doesn’t have respect for most of America. Stay tuned.
If you had told 6 year old me that the guy I was doing impressions of would eventually run for president, I probably wouldn’t have thought much of it. Yes, 6 year old already-liberal me would have been too naive to see the impending doom of a Trump campaign. The horrible things he has said would have gone right over my head and the policies he wants to enact would mean nothing to me. My only hope is that the American people are smarter than 6 year old me and that they see this modern snake oil salesman for what he is, a con man and liar. America, it’s time to be honest with yourself, because Trump hasn’t been.
Windsor Gazette 