The grumbles of an anonymous 42-year-old "politics reporter," here explaining why he is still an undecided voter.
And then I also obviously struggle with Donald Trump. The things I like about him are: I believe that sometimes you just have to blow shit up to build it again, and I think that a Trump presidency would do that. But just when I sort of get there with him, like, Ohhhhhhkayyyy, he says or does something and I'm like, "No, I can't!" Like saying, "What do you have to lose?" to African-Americans. Like, WHAT? What?
I think I would just have to sort of give in to my chaos theory of Trump and just hope that he surrounds himself with the right people enough that it's not a total disaster? Or Hillary would have to do a really convincing and honest come-to-Jesus with the media. A real press conference.
So the choices are between Donald Trump, who says insane things and will "blow shit up" and who has never, ever in this campaign surrounded himself with "the right people," unless you count an increasingly tight embrace of conspiracy theorists and petty internet racists to be "the right people," but who will any day now maybe reverse his entire worldview and instead start hanging out with and taking the advice of the Serious Republicans in the world ...
... or Hillary Clinton, who could best this litany of horrors if and only if she gives our hero a press conference that he personally deems correctly press-conferencey. It's between that or blowin' shit up time.
I cover this stuff every day. So for me, four years of Trump, selfishly, sounds a lot more enticing, just because it's going to be a dumpster fire. And a Clinton administration would be more of what we're seeing now, which is carefully orchestrated speeches, behind-the-scenes Wealthy McWealthysons going in and out of the White House, and really horrible transparency with the press.
It does make writing the material a lot easier, I'll grant you that. Nothing livens up the ol' press beat like a planned purge of ethnic undesirables or the odd nuclear tit-for-tat after President Tinyhands reads something he doesn't like on Twitter.
As an aside, there's a particular thing I don't get here, in the Clinton-Trump revulsion wars, and that is the attention that many people give to the notion that the Clintons are too much in bed with "Wealthy McWealthysons" what with having a large foundation and traveling the world and speaking fees and whatnot. These are all perfectly reasonable opinions to have, mind you, and a valid condemnation of nearly every individual national officeholder in the country—but that this is more disqualifying than grabbing one particular Wealthy McWealthyson Himself. It’s someone whose public persona is the omnipresent insistence that he is the Wealthiest McWealthyson of them all, and just putting the dimwitted blow-shit-up moron in charge of it all because the resulting carnage would at least not be so irritatingly subtle.
A man who, even through the campaign, has shown no ability whatsoever to distinguish between policies that would better the nation versus policies that would better himself, personally, and indeed whose campaign is almost entirely funded and vouched by his fellow Wealthy McWealthysons outright. (Recall, for example, the Republican National Convention, which consisted of a lineup of wealthy people who had once done business with Donald Trump and not-wealthy people currently collecting paychecks from Trump personally, which is nigh on the best parody of what a perpetually conceited Wealthy McWealthyson presidential campaign would look like.)
Accepting this very common critique of both candidates at face value, you still have, on one hand, a candidate who hobnobs behind the scenes with Wealthy McWealthysons; on the other hand, a great gilded tire fire, the very personification of ultra-rich boorishness and self-indulgence, the precise sort of lout that you imagine the other candidate scheming with in private. That guy. As leader of it all.
That doesn't seem like a legitimate argument. That seems like working backward from the conclusion: I do not like this candidate because she does not give press conferences directed at me, personally. Because she does not give press conferences directed at me, personally, it must mean she is hiding something from me. If she is hiding something from me, it must be scandalous and possibly corrupt; she must therefore be exactly as scandalous and corrupt as the man who wears his scandalousness and corruption on his sleeve.
There can't possibly be any individuals in the nation who are both concerned about the corrupting influence of money in politics and believe that Donald J. Trump is the needed remedy, or is in fact anything other than that very same national corruption taken to its most ridiculous on-the-nose extreme. It's implausible.