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.
I was Ted Cruz up until somewhere of early 2016. I liked what Trump had to say and had been following him since his elevator speech (was a regular Rush Limbaugh listener at the time and still watched Faux News) but still had some faith that the GOP was trying to do the right thing (Jeb Jeb aside) plus I had the Doc Brown style reaction of “The Apprentice Guy?!”
My first inkling that something was wrong in the Matrix was when Jeb Jeb categorically denied every statement that Trump put forth and spewed Democrat talking points (immigration great, DACA great, muricans don’t like to work). But then that was Jeb Jeb… second was when Cruz just avoided the issues outright.
I don’t recall if I voted for Trump or Cruz in the primary. I’m thinking Trump… certainly voted for him in general but didn’t expect him to win.
The Jan 2016 happened and all hell broke loose as everyone lost their minds with MeToo, Faux News got gutted along with obvious personal/political hunt downs of anybody that was a Trump ally, including Steve Wynn. Then cancel culture… then impeachment for being Trump… then Chinese Flu and then the wheels really came off!
It’s been a real learning experience as to how infiltrated and entrenched communism had become (and is still trying) and it’s ironic because all they had to do was play straight man to Trump’s rhetoric. Be ultra lawful, uphold the state to Trumps “bull in a china shop” behavior. But no - what the socialist utopian communist leadership defended the most wasn’t their ideology… wasn’t the defense of the people nor was it trying to further their socialist utopia… no, they had to have revenge because their egos were hurt and it dropped the veil on everything.