When he announced his running prior to 2016, I thought it was a joke.
The apprentice guy? I was born in 92 and really just hardly aware of him except for the apprentice, of which I only watched a few of the celebrity apprentice episodes because it had celebrities on that I liked such as Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette.
So I didn't really care for Trump for two reasons.
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I associated him with reality TV and I did and still do despise reality TV. I saw it and still see it as one of those things that decayed the American culture.
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When he was the subject of a comedy central roast around the time he announced he was running, he didn't seem like he could take a joke.
I've since seen that Trump's not the type of guy who does big hearty showy laughs. If he's amused by something he'll just sort of smile. But at the time, I didn't think he had a sense of humor about himself, and I've always been someone who's wary of people who can't take jokes about themselves.
But what changed for me officially was when I saw a video of his, one of his campaign videos addressing the problem of political correctness in the culture and stifling free speech.
That alone was enough to ensure I was behind him 100%. I never saw any other "conservative" politician boldly address this issue or even address it at all really.
Mostly it was just us on the internet fighting the culture war who bothered to address and fight political correctness. Where was John McCain's take down of PC culture? Where was Mitt Romney's takedown of PC culture? But here, the guy who I thought was just doing this for attention as a reality TV guy, is the only one to flat-out say, political correctness is a problem and needs to be addressed.
So that video made me a Trump supporter. Then seeing how the mainstream media treated the man made me see things even clearer.
Same with the celebrity culture crap. He was a risk as formerly being part of that upper class Democrat city crowd. I thought his latching on to the birthed phenomenon was opportunistic attention seeking. But around his official run, he was willing to say stuff like "Haiti is a shithole" (whether he said that specifically post inauguration). I still voted libertarian, but Trump surprised me by doing the most a president can do to cut spending and regulations, with the hand he was dealt.
Voted for him 2020/2024. I don't like his continuation of Perot's proposed protectionism, and I would prefer Ron Paul's idea of true free trade. At least Trump is threatening tariffs to get other countrys' shit together where it concerns American citizens' interests. I can't support the libertarian party until the Mises paleo-libertarians break away from the LP, so Trump is the best we will get in my lifetime. Maybe another small country will figure out a controlled border, gun ownership, and constitutionally constrained government scope.
Free trade is a gigantic globalist lie.
Progressives decried free market healthcare in America, not realizing that it hasn't existed for 45+ years. Populists do the same with NAFTA, not realizing it wasn't a free trade agreement. Free trade is about independent individuals and businesses trading with other independents, without artificial middlemen and barriers. These satanic multinationals don't go away with managed trade agreements, antitrust fakery, and similar bait-and-switches. All these do is open up regulatory capture, to raise the water level so that more independent competitors drown while the politically connected float.
Trump may end up being the greatest Libertarian presidential candidate. If he rescinds the Income Tax, I'm calling him a Libertarian president.