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.
Short answer: "Fight, fight fight!"
Long answer: I liked most of what he was saying in the 2016 election cycle, I just didn't trust him to do any of it. I especially liked the way he had a sort of passive ability to get intellectual frauds to expose themselves in the most obvious ways by responding to some of his completely non-controversial statements with the most unhinged vitriol.
I liked a lot of what he did in his first term even if I thought there were missed opportunities and some mistakes.
I liked his campaign pretty well in 2023-2024.
But after he got shot and his first instinct was to stand up and say "fight, fight, fight!" I was 100% all in. That is the guy you want to be in charge. I've never witnessed a more incredible moment in my life and that includes fiction.