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.
I guess I've never really liked Trump. Not until recently.
In fact, I can tell you that there were times I hated him, or even made me want to punch him in the mouth.
That thing where he pulls somebody... hard... in a hand shake? I would absolutely take that as a physical attack if someone did that to me, and I would respond with violence. That shit pissed me off when I first saw it. But normally he does it to people that I find out later are unmitigated cunts, like the French PM.
I never liked him, but he's certainly the greatest president I ever had in my life time, and I say this as someone who originally voted Hillary in 2016. Republican down ballot, but I figured that Hillary was literally smarter and more calculating, and Trump would be more of an ignorant wild-man. I never believed Hillary wanted a full-scale ground war with Russia. I figured she would be kept in check by a Republican MAGA congress. I figured he would accidentally start a war.
Turns out the idea that she is a savy political operator was the biggest lie she ever told. She's actually wildly stupid, and her behavior since she lost proves it. Sargon was right: she wanted a nuclear exchange with Russia. Now, I think Biden did too, and they couldn't get one started. Everyone who argued that Hillary wanted a land war in Asia, if not a nuclear exchange, was 100% right and I shouldn't have dismissed your concerns as quickly as I did.
And this was after I had been losing my mind repeatedly over Trump's treatment by the media. NPR's "On The Media" (a media watchdog program), explicitly stated they had to abandon objective journalism to "stop a despot". And I remember screaming at my radio over the Hollywood Access tapes because "Let" is not "rape".
I think the thing that made me like Trump was Betsy DeVos. Trump's 1st term best cabinet pick. The first thing she did was rescind the "Dear Colleague" memo which instantiated the Title IX Tribunal system in colleges, and had lead to a show-trial system which created over 150 federal lawsuits. I was the "victim" in one of those tribunals and had to defend my "attacker" to prevent the school from expelling him for nothing. I was never called before the tribunal, I was left to defend him in a written statement asserting his moral character. He told me I had to keep it vague because telling me the charges against him could get him expelled. People should have gone to prison for that system. When she rescinded the memo, the head of NOW came onto an NPR show I was listening to and explicitly stated that she had made rape legal on college campuses. Cue me: screaming at the radio again.
Anyways, I remember her being declared utterly incompetent and a hilariously stupid pick. And removing that was the first thing she did. From then on, she never had a scandal, and there were no real complains with her activity. The Title IX tribunals aren't totally dead, but they have no legal or judicial basis at this point, they're just the Universities being gulags.
That made me like him by proxy. He was gonna do the right thing, and I don't give a shit that he rustled jimmies on Twitter. But I wasn't a fan of his.
I would say the thing that really made me a Trump fan was him standing up after the assassination. That's very much the correct attitude to have in response to taking a bullet. Little reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt. Love it. That is the type of personal character we need, along with the "Happy Warrior" mantra that he got from Banon. Stellar.