They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. For me personally, my first impression (and “uh-oh” moment) of what the upcoming four years under President Donald Trump would bring, came on the day after his Presidential inauguration.
Some background first. Although not able to vote in the Presidential election in 2016 due to being a resident of Puerto Rico, I was actually leaning toward Trump as a preferable candidate to Hillary Clinton. I wasn’t thrilled about either, but felt Trump might be the lesser of two evils.
When Trump was elected I thought, “Well… something good might come out of this.” The day after the inauguration, Sean Spicer, the former White House Press Secretary and Trump’s mouthpiece, stood at the podium in front of the media and verbally sparred with members of the press corps over the size of the inauguration crowd.
My first reaction was, “Who cares about crowd size numbers at an inauguration ceremony?” “Are we really going to be embroiled in such a meaningless, pitiful detail right off the bat?” “Is this the way this new administration is going to be conducted?”
No… I will not exonerate the press from picking on Trump’s outsized, fragile, infamous, and well-known ego right from the start. But I would have imagined the conversation between the media and Spicer to go something like this:
Press: “Is it true that Trump’s inauguration crowd size was smaller than Barack Obama’s crowd size in 2009?”
Spicer: “I believe there are vastly more important issues at hand that should be discussed regarding our nation’s future, than to be comparing the size of inauguration crowds. I will gladly discuss any of those other issues.”
Instead, it became something resembling a “my dad is stronger than your dad” type of conversation. For the record, photographs and data clearly show that Obama’s crowd was nearly three times as large as the Trump crowd. But that’s not even the point. Had Trump and his mouthpiece just put some perspective into the media as suggested above, my initial impression would have been completely different.
Instead, Trump chose to embark on his 3 and a half year journey of Presidential lying, most of it blatant and incredibly obvious.
I will say it before anyone else does. All politicians lie. All Presidents lie and have lied. But Trump’s lies have taken on epic, colossal proportions. Politicians will usually try to soften the lie so as to not insult the audience’s intelligence. Trump just blurts out his lies with the full knowledge that “he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and still not lose any voters.”
But back to first impressions. With that seemingly meaningless skirmish about crowd size, an alarm went off inside my head, providing a vision of what was to follow. I figured, if Trump can shamelessly lie about inauguration crowd sizes despite of all the photographs and data that proved otherwise… what other, more important things is he capable of shamelessly lying about.
Almost four years later, my first impression has proven accurate once again.
To be honest my Uh-Oh moment was when he won the Republican Party nomination. I just couldn’t believe that people were actually taking him seriously. He always came across to me as a charlatan and a creep.
I’m now better understanding people’s ardent dislike for Hillary Clinton. At the time, I just saw her as the more qualified of the two candidates and, as we learned more about Trump, I couldn’t comprehend how anyone in their right mind would vote for him.
Now, I see that there are many people that don’t really vote for the individual but for the political party they represent; Many people whose vote only rests on one issue: economy, abortion rights, military funding, guns etc…
Intellectually, I can understand that logic. We all have our priorities in life and if you know that one political party is more likely to cater to those priorities, then that’s who you’re voting for.
Emotionally, though, these last four years have elicited in me such a level of disbelief, outrage, and, ultimately, disgust that I think that logic should go out the window if only until the 2024 presidential election.
While Joe Biden is also far from ideal, he’s at least less polarizing than Hillary Clinton was. Hopefully, those people that voted for Trump four years ago because they just couldn’t stomach Hillary, or because he seemed like an outsider that could “get things done”, or simply because he was the Republican candidate now see that this man is far from worthy of the office he capriciously chose to undertake. Hopefully, this time they choose to vote, perhaps not exactly for Joe Biden, but against Trump and against all that ugliness that he as an individual represents.
Excellent comments, Angela… and thank you for that! To be perfectly honest, the adjectives “charlatan” and “creep” were not far from my own mind, as objective as I always try to be. Pretty sure they were the words in the minds of many other people as well.
In a way it’s too bad the 2016 election came down to a choice between Trump and Hillary. In retrospect, anybody would’ve been better than Trump, although I still maintain that Hillary would not have made a good President.
The single issue voters, as you well mention, do carry a lot of weight. If your particular passion is the gun issue… or abortion rights… etc…. then yes, you will likely vote for the candidate or political party that represents your view on that topic.
As much as I want to see Trump lose the upcoming election, I cannot help but be disappointed in what in my opinion has been a subpar effort by the Democratic Party to put together the right action plan to unseat Trump.
Your points about why people probably voted for Trump in 2016 are well taken, and I agree. Yes… hopefully people will see things clearly for what they are, and vote against Trump, who as many have said is totally unfit for the office of President of the United States.
Stay tuned to my blog, as I will continue to write about the upcoming elections and Donald Trump in particular.