The candidacy of Donald Trump has been like no other, and it has filled the entire world with a constant and ever-renewing horror, shock, anger, and fascination over his seemingly never-ending stream of outrageous statements. "Does he really believe these outrageous things that he is saying?", "What will happen to the world if he becomes president?", "How can people vote for this guy?", "How do we stop him?", are some of the questions that people worryingly keep asking themselves.
I myself have also been caught up in this circus, and have pendled between all these emotions - which have led me to seek to understand this whole phenomenon. There have been many important pieces to this puzzle of understanding. The first piece just established how incredible outlandish his statements are, how embarassing they are for the reputation of the US democracy, and how big of a threat this - already now! - they pose to global stability and our preservation of world piece. The second piece has been to see the success of his candidacy as an expression for a strong desire among the general public for change, to vote against the establishment, to express its distrust in the public mainstream media worldview. These desires are overlapping with the desires behind the Sanders campaign, and seen from this perspective, the Trump candidacy is a hope-inspiring reflection of the fact that our society seems to be on the verge of major changes, since media and the establishment no longer can control our worldview. We, the alternative media, we in the bloggosphere et al, are now such an important factor that 2 out of the 3 most prominent candidates, Trump and Sanders, can be outsiders, financed in a non-standard way, and actively fought by the mainstream establishment. It is also important to realize that the Trump campaign is revealing pre-existing views and beliefs that many people have had for a long time, and that now at last have become widely known and now can be dealt with and evolved, i.e. cleansed out of our society (as pointed out by by e.g. Will Smith). However, my most recent - and in some ways also most important - such piece of insight came with the video above.
The story in the clip above - as so many other stories I like - starts with a historical perspective. In this case, they have a look at the campaign of John Kerry, who made a statement that in context made perfect sense (to most people), but which out of context could be twisted to something that was a central component in making Kerry lose the election. This example illustrates how careful a politician normally has to be in how he/she expresses himself/herself, so that these kind of misconstrued quotes and clips cannot be made. The story then contrasts this with Donald Trump, who has gone to the other extreme: he has made it a thing to several times a week come with extremely outlandish statements that individually normally would sink any other presidential candidate, but in his case just builds the hype around him. (to understand how this can be possible, I really like the analogy of John Oliver, who compares it to standing on nails: stand on one and you are screwed, but stand on thousands closely adjacent nails and you are fine) In the story, they illustrate this by his latest (at the time of writing) outlandish statement: that Obama literary founded ISIS, and that Clinton was the co-founder. They move to a clip where he says this for the first time, and then to a clip where he is forced to defend his statement in an interview. It is in that interview that the revealing statement comes: he sort of acknowledges that the statement can only be argued to be true figuratively, and that there are other versions of the statement that would serve as more accurate versions (a few days later he even said that he was sarcastic, another of his tactics). To this viewpoint he says:
"But, nobody is talking about your version of the statement, they are talking about mine"
In other words, to Trump it is more important that they are talking about him, than that they are agreeing with his statements. To him it is more important to be seen and heard, to be a celebrity so to say, than to be right. It has often been said that he is our first reality TV politician, and I see now more than ever how this certainly is true: he is more similar to a star in the scandal-ridden Big Brother, than he is similar to a Kennedy. Both a soap opera star and Trump survive in their competitions by creating scandals that puts them among the headlines, and to both of them it is more important to be in the headlines than to provide an accurate depiction of themselves and their actual views. What we are seeing is therefore in many ways the biggest reality show ever seen. I therefore think that the ending to the video is so accurate: Trump has indeed become a master in creating headlines and media attention to himselves; the main question is therefore if he will be able to harness this media attention to achieve the political ambitions that he has got.
Why was this insight, this new piece of understanding clicking into place, such a relief for me? Well, it is primarily because it means that I feel that I at last have a grasp on how to understand the man! What drives him, why is he acting the way he is acting? Things you don't understand how they work, and that for one reason or another are powerful enough to affect things that you care about, are things that easily get your attention. But now I know that it is because he is primarily seeking attention. I know now that it is his outspoken strategy to make overly exaggerated statements to reach the headlines, and make them so often that no single one of them stands out and hurts him, and then after the attention is obtained, soften the statement, so one can believe what one wants about his actual views. (this strategy is also evident in his campaign funding: he spends only a tiny fraction of the amount of money that Hillary Clinton spends on TV-ads - he gets much more in the news than she does anyway!). I know now that this attention in many ways is the end goal for him. And I know now that the question for the rest of us is"how do we want to relate to his strategy, and are we going to let him use this reality TV strategy to win true political power?". This question is a question I very much can live with, and look forward to contributing with an answer to. Now that I understand that that this is what is going on here.
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