With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
A big part of Trump's appeal is that, behind the spray-tan and the money and the political ambition, he just seems like a dude. There's an odd charisma to that. During his first term, sometimes you could tell he was just chilling in
Cedar Rapidsthe White House watching cable, because Fox and Friends would be discussing some issue and the President of the United States would just... call in. Or tweet about the issue.Trump's tweets themselves were a big part of Trump!45's appeal, as he just said whatever he was thinking about unapologetically. He felt raw. You talk to Trump supporters, and the number one thing they'll tell you is that Trump "tells it like it is." I'm not so sure about the epistemics of that, but certainly Trump frequently sounds like an actual person, he has the kind of political conversations people have with friends and family in private, but just in front of other people. That's why people go to his rallies, it feels like home!
Even back when I hated Trump, I acknowleged the rawness of his tweeting and speaking and found it impressive -- not in terms of his diction, but in terms of how he just communicated like some guy, just a guy being a dude. He contrasts so powerfully with the obvious fakeness of politicians like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, whose every word you know was focus-tested. Kamala Harris is terrified of verbal blunders -- that's why she falls into word salad, she's afraid of making a mistake and so just repeats the talking points she knows are safe.
By contrast, the big thing Trump's hilariously, ridiculously bad at is giving a prepared speech. He stands there and reads the teleprompter like a 10th grader reads their assigned sentence in Great Expectations. Sometimes you get the sense he's never heard the very words he's speaking before (and he probably hasn't), and you get Donald Trump live-tweeting his own speech, which is hilarious and strangely charismatic. I was just watching his victory speech, and he reads:
And then, looking away from the teleprompter, goes:
He's reacting to his own speech! He's not figuratively but literally going, "wow, we did? We took back the senate? Wow, that's great!" It makes you follow along his thought process, which makes you feel closer to him than you are. He combines this with frequent references to "we," and even infamously talked about himself in the third person at times during term 1. The point is that he makes people feel like they're up there on the stage with him: he makes people feel empowered. These are absolutely the sort of skills -- creating a sense of intimacy and power -- that come up in all sorts of interpersonal domains, like sales, friendly banter, and even flirting. The man is rizzing an entire country.
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