We are desperate for the joke to end, but every day we turn on our computers and televisions and phones, only to be further tormented by the unending farce of hate-speech, intolerance, and pigheadedness that Mr. Trump calls policy. It has been easier to pass him off as a joke than to stomach the full reality of his political relevance, and at the end of the day, we are worse off because of it.
The truth is that I am, in no way, an expert or an authority on politics. I’ve always found it easier to treat our election process more like theatre, and to be honest, I think a lot of my generation does. It’s difficult to take it seriously when people like Bush and Kerry are your only options, and our generation has never really, in my opinion, had the option of choosing between two genuinely adequate presidential candidates.
The political quasi-equilibrium that Louis C.K. referenced, in his open letter about Trump, might be a distant memory to him, but for millennials it is a fantasy. It’s always been a case of choosing between the lesser of two evils, and as such, it’s hard to imagine why we should care. It’s a joke, or worse, a joke that’s been repeated too many times, and President Donald J. Trump makes for the perfect punch-line.
In a detached, absurdist sense, it would be beautifully ironic for Trump to win. It would be funny. It would be spectacular. A loud, irreverent, single-minded, socially inept neanderthal going all the way from reality television host to leader of the free world—it almost sounds like some kind of lesser Kurt Vonnegut novel, and I would love to read it. I readily admit that the temptation to relish in that absurdity is powerful, but it’s detrimental to our society, in a very unfunny way, to allow such purposefully inane and manipulative discourses to entertain our national curiosity for so long, and it’s well past time to put an end to it.
It’s not funny anymore. This isn’t a Saturday Night Live Sketch. It’s not Real Housewives of D.C. (despite what the republican debates would lead us to believe). It’s not the Apprentice. It’s an actual thing. He’s an actual person competing for a position of actual power, and no matter how ridiculous every other candidate has seemed for the last two decades, each and every one of them, amazingly, would be more suitable and more trustworthy than Mr. Trump. He is a disgrace to our government, our history, and our future, and we should be ashamed of any political environment toxic enough to spawn something so ideologically grotesque.
We should interpret his rise to importance as a symptom of a diseased and wrongheaded political system: one that promotes, even celebrates, the kind of vacuous sensationalism and bigotry that has dominated this year’s primaries. These, despite the spastic, and frequent, exclamations of Mr. Trump, are not the values our country was founded upon, nor the values we should have come to admire.
Trey Davis 