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.
-
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.
-
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.
In 2016 I started liking him because they would always have CNN on when my buddy and I would get lunch every Friday. I'm not a genius, but I could see through the constant negative BS they made up about him. Clearly there was something they were trying to stop. Flash forward to 2016 election night I was kind of rooting for him but didn't want to admit it yet. Even at that point if you asked me if I supported Trump I would have probably given a vague and non-committal answer.
Charlottesville was really the nail in the coffin for me. Saw a lot of friends freaking out on Facebook about how racist Trump is for what he said. Thought that this was finally the smoking gun I was waiting for that would prove Trump was the piece of crap everyone was saying he is. Watched the full speech and was absolutely floored by how divorced from reality everyone's screeching was. It was evident people were getting themselves into a frenzy over headlines and select snippets and not the full context.
From then on it has pretty much been a mad dash to the right for me. Orange man ain't perfect but he's the best we've had in my lifetime. Hope he's just the beginning of the pendulum swing.