There is practically nobody, whose opinion I would trust uncritically. I believe that simply accepting a point of view acquired from any media source is not a sound state of reality for a conscious individual. Because of that, in the issues that matter, I highly appreciate articles, which give me an opportunity to clearly separate facts from author’s opinions and media’s propaganda. The plan for this piece was therefore to write an objective, down to Earth summary of what Donald Trump seeks to represent with himself, with no prejudice and no tendentious research. However, I have to admit I failed miserably in fulfilling it.
I sat down with my laptop and a strong decision to remain preserving and watch all three U.S. Presidential Debates, which I did. They end conclusion was that I end up knowing everything about both candidates sins and peccadilloes, but almost nothing about their policies. I proceeded to read the policy statements of Donald Trump publish on his website. I ended up lost in the tones accusations toward Obama’s Administration and Hillary Clinton.
I knew that it is really hard to construct a valid picture of a person based on the knowledge given you by the media. It turns out however that if that person happens to be a candidate for U.S. President, it gets almost impossible. The attempt to admit objectiveness of judgement to any source is an illusion, even more than usually, and a simple trust in truthfulness would be a pure naivety. Therefore, there are only three ways left to acquire any valuable knowledge, on which you can base your judgement if somebody is worthy of our vote: judging from the appearance, from the official policy statements and from the actions. The knowledge based on those sources is however not purely objective and subject to value judgement when processed into writing. Let me therefore evaluate on those and present you with what I conclude out of it.
Judging from appearance.
The appearance is usually correctly considered misleading. There is no sense in judging a person by the way she dresses up or by her body language. A politician’s work, especially the leader’s, is however strictly connected with those aspects – they has to move the crowds and earn respect.
After watching the Presidential Debates I came up with the single, simple conclusion about the message that Donald Trump sends with his physics and behaviour: complete lack of class. In other words – vulgarity.
It is a different thing when you don’t agree with your opponent’s views or when you bring up the wrongs that she did. It’s competition, it’s politics, it’s a fierce world, we all get it. But it is something completely different, when you are purely a boor. Not answering the question you are asked, talking 100% of the time you have about the weaknesses of your opponent instead of explaining your plan, offending people, both your opponent and those uninvolved in the situation directly – women, Latinos, other minorities, interrupting the other candidate when she is talking; those are things, which show how unmannerly you are, and how low you can go. Inability to guard your point of view with worldly arguments shows, how surreal they are.
Judging from official policy statements.
When you type into google ‘ Trump Donald’ this incredibly funny and redundant website obtains better positioning than the actual website of Trump’s campaign: TrumpDonald.
Reading through their policies and plans should be the very most popular manner of choosing your candidate – by what they are going to do and how they are planning to accomplish it. But I am a realist – considering how badly written, long and boring those statements are, I doubt that a reasonable amount of voters spend their time to analyse them in the way they ought to. What’s more – those statements are mingled with perfectly round phrases as ‘Uphold our freedoms, constitutional values and principles that our country was founded on.’ or ‘Transform America’s crumbling infrastructure into a golden opportunity for accelerated economic growth and more rapid productivity gains with a deficit-neutral plan targeting substantial new infrastructure investments.’, which don’t make it any more accessible and don’t really bring anything into the discussion.
Here you have what I took out of it, after slowly crawling through Trump’s policy statements on 15 different topics.
Trumps want to increase military spending, lower the business taxes from 30% to 15%, support school choice and lowering of university tuitions, allow deduction of childcare from the taxes and many, many more. An impartial agency, called Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, judges that his reforms would cost U.S. the public debt to rise by 52 percentage points during his presidency. You can find out more about the Trump-effect on economy reading Michel’s article on that topic.
Trumps advocates a veterans reform, however his website talks much more about reducing the alleged fraud in the veterans fund structures, than about actual change in the policies. He supports exportation of illegal immigrants, blocking the inflow from the ‘dangerous’ countries, which happen to be exactly the ones in need, and building a wall that would separate the U.S. from Mexico. Trump harshly argues against Obama Care act and promotes idea of the free market for the health care. Since recently, he switches from being pro-choice towards being pro-life and supports the anti- abortion policy strengthening. He supports the guns availability and is against any additional regulation in this matter. The external policy suggested by Trumps involves renegotiation or withdrawal of most international agreements (NAFTA deals, TTIP) and labelling China as currency manipulator.
Judging from actions.
Last but not least, judging a person by its action – this is exactly what the modern world advocates to do when forming ones opinions. The biggest asset that Trumps claims to possess is his Business knowledge. The phrase of the ‘small loan of million dollars’ that his father gave him for starting the business loses most of its ridicule when contrasted with the size of the empire he created. And how much you would oppose his views, this is a thing you cannot refuse him – his company is his great success. However, the situations by which you can shape your view on his opinion about the world are speaking much less in his favour.
Trump did not release his tax returns for unknown reasons and used not to pay federal income tax. He commonly talks about women in a degrading manner, allowing to his own daughter to be calleda good piece of ass. A recording from a few years back disclosed Trump saying that you can touch and kiss women without their consent. Even though he argues it was a locker-room talk dated a few years back, I do not believe that a man aged 60 or 70 has a different view in those matter.
He mocked handicapped journalist, made sexual jokes about former Miss Universe, disrespected family of killed U.S. Muslim soldier and accused President Obama of not being U.S.A. born. He uses phrases as ‘bad hombres’ meaning Latinos and ‘a nasty women’ directed towards Secretary Clinton. Recently Trump refused to admit that he will accept her as the President if she wins the race against him.
We have Halloween today – the day of scary things and cult of fear, witches and zombies, death and life after it. But do you know what is really scary? The most terrifying thing is a thought, that in addition to the facts, at least part of the information about Trump that the media feeds us with is true. The most dreadful nightmare is a reality in which a man like him becomes a President of the United States of America, the leader of the whole Western world. Judging from the facts themselves, Donald Trump is the last person I would like to see as the President of United States. And the most scary costume I saw at the Saturday night Halloween party was a guy in a white trash bag, with a caption at his back saying ‘White Trash’ and ones at his front ‘Vote for Trump’.