Picture a place with no Chinese imports, Eastern-European prostitutes for the taking and fountains of oil in every major shopping center. We don’t know about you, but this sounds like America to us. A brand new, beautiful America. And who better to lead us on than a man who takes “amber waves of grain” to heart so much that he also takes it to his hairdresser?
We want a president with confidence — the confidence to call the entire country of China “motherfuckers,” the confidence to stand up for both green energy and oil drilling in the same sentence and the confidence to take credit for President Obama’s presentation of his birth certificate. We want a man who will sit us down in his board room and be frank and honest with us. We’re fired, and as we’ll tell the confession cam later: we’re OK with that.
But it’s all just a pipedream, right? We’ll never get the president we deserve. But wait … it’s super hush-hush, so don’t say we’re the ones who told you, but Donald Trump is considering a run for presidency. Breathe easy, America, our hero is coming.
According to the Los Angeles Times write-up of Trump’s April 28 speech in Las Vegas, the legend addressed Obama’s dubious “citizenship” and proudly declared, “Hillary Clinton tried to get him to do it, Bill Clinton tried to get him to do it, John McCain, who’s a wonderful guy, tried to get him to do it, nobody could get him to do it and he did it because we went after him hard, were tough negotiators like this country needs.”
If Trump can get Obama to buckle under pressure and fork over his birth certificate, imagine what other great and stupid causes he can nag at during his presidency! Maybe he’ll be able to get terrorists to register like sex offenders or maybe he’ll finally get the Feds to update the White House — it’s about time, really, because neoclassicism is so late 18th century.
As much as politics are a big game, there’s a fairly distinct line between typical dirty campaigns and a circus sideshow. It’s the same line Arnold Schwarzenegger crossed back in the 2003 recall election that also saw adult film actress Mary Carey, Gary Coleman, a woman referred to only as “Angelyne” and Arianna Huffington vying for governor. It seemed as though every day a new celebrity was thinking of joining the race or another publicity-hungry Hollywood whack-job was being interviewed on the news. For many of us growing up during this election and watching the aftermath of a destructive political upheaval, we were discouraged from believing that politics are anything more than a popularity contest.
Voter efficacy is low. Perhaps if our nation’s mindset wasn’t that presidency is just another form of celebrity, voters would look past whether or not each candidate spent every Sunday in a church. Perhaps if campaigns were more issue-driven than personality-driven, African-American presidents with Arabic names wouldn’t have their birth certificates published on front pages all over the world.
We live in a celebrity-obsessed world, where Charlie Sheen gets a considerable amount of editorial space, even though he’s a terrible actor on a terrible TV show, just because of a mental breakdown. The media, of which we are included, gloms onto people and keeps them in the headlines for as long as possible while more important things go unnoticed. The media is mental novocaine that keeps people from knowing and caring about the real issues.
When picking a president, shouldn’t we be allowed to pick from a group of people who bring those issues forward instead of overshadowing them with their astronomical character? We don’t want a president who will take care of us and pat us on the head telling us not to worry, they have it handled. We want to be an informed public and we want our president to focus on the issues so much that we are forced to focus on them too instead of on their citizenship or religion or race relations. In that case, maybe we do want Donald Trump – or at least a more intelligent and less crazy version of him.
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