5 Reasons You Might One Day Vote For A Donald J Trump

Trump's Superpower Is Distrust.

We normally look at skepticism as a good thing. Being overly trusting, or "a sucker," tends to cause problems, like falling for pranks and voting despots into power. But what people don't realize is that skepticism, when taken far enough, dips right on over the horizon and comes up on the other side as a big old burning ball of gullibility.

Take Trump supporters. Just going with my Debunk Trump Twitter project,* it seems like Trump's supporters are the least skeptical people ever. Trump lies so frequently and about so many different kinds of things that he comes off like a teenager trying to test the boundaries of inattentive parents. Isn't refusing to do 15 seconds of fact-checking the very definition of gullibility?

No, because it turns out that the trust in Trump actually comes from a distrust in everything else. Though everybody complains about how dishonest and biased the mainstream media is, it's really Republicans and independents who feel that way the most strongly, according to a Gallup Poll.

In their mind, they've already found out who the liars are, and it's not the spray-tanned were-hedgehog. The fact that the Republicans are no longer paying attention to the news makes them a perfect target for someone like Trump, who has a real talent for saying things that, despite not being true, sure are fun to hear. "Build a wall! Yeah! Just like in Ancient China and Game Of Thrones!"

Turns out this is Trump's superpower. Barack Obama's innovative presidential campaign -- which used social media like no candidate before him -- became a nuclear bomb in Trump's case because it allows him to bypass anyone who would fact-check him and say literally whatever he wanted. Because remember, the people who support him don't trust the fact-checkers.

Now, if you think I'm mocking Trump supporters, or gloating about how stupid they are, then just wait ...

*Look at me plugging something that doesn't even make me any money. I'm terrible. Go buy one of my co-workers' books.

Everyone Wants an Excuse to Dismiss Boring News

At the height of Jon Stewart's popularity in the mid-to-late 2000s, people complained about what his success meant a lot. "It's such a shame that a comedian is giving us better news than the actual news networks!" they would lament, shaking their heads sadly at how bad things had gotten and would always be.

This wasn't true, of course. Jon Stewart had a half-hour nightly comedy show where the format was "cover two topics and interview a celebrity." He almost never reported anything, not in anything beyond the now-standard "aggregate the work other people have done and comment on it" sense. He'd just make really great jokes about how bad other people were at their jobs. If not for the actual journalism performed by the people he was criticizing, he wouldn't have had anything to talk about.

That's not a dig against Stewart. He fucking admitted this in the middle of the episode of Crossfire, when he exploded that TV show from the inside like Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black:

STEWART: What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. And I will tell you why I know it.
CARLSON: You had John Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you're accusing us of partisan hackery?
STEWART: Absolutely.
CARLSON: You've got to be kidding me. He comes on and you ...
STEWART: You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?

Four months later, Crossfire was cancelled.

People took this as evidence that Stewart was a better journalist than Tucker Carlson, and while he's certainly better at his job than Carlson, that job is different, and that is the goddamn point. He's commenting on the failures of the reporters, but he's in no place to replace them, and he never wanted to. But nevertheless:

Maybe this distinction stands out to me more because I also do entertainment that borders on journalism, so the difference between what I do and traditional reporting seems huge and important. All the comedy shows that parody news formats are constantly making decisions about what to talk about, and that decision always factors in questions of "can we make this funny" and "do people already care." As long as people are ignoring stories because they can't be funny with them, we still need traditional, unfunny journalism.

So it's upsetting to me when I see people saying that Last Week Tonight does "a better job informing viewers than actual news outlets" by comparing its segment on Miss America Scholarships to the reporting done by fucking tech blogs. You may as well be comparing them to Breitbart or the LiveJournal I had in high school. The study argues that viewers of these satirical shows are more informed than people who don't watch the shows, which ignores the fact that people watching these shows are more likely to be keeping up with the news anyway (John Oliver also insists that what he does isn't journalism).

And that's actually the problem, because it turns out...

Being Skeptical Of "Everything" Creates A Bubble

On its surface, skepticism seems like it's hard work, right? You have to fact-check every new thing you learn, but the payoff is that you fill your brain up with stuff that you know for sure is true.

Except in practice, that's rarely what happens. In practice, you only end up debunking and fact-checking the stuff that you hope isn't true. The stuff that doesn't fit into how you already think the world works. Think about how harshly rape victims are interrogated and questioned and accused of lying compared to victims of literally any other crime. Or think about how willing you are to forgive a politician you like for using a figure of speech or hyperbole, and how quickly you jump on any tiny factual error in a statement from a politician you dislike.

I'm a great example here. I literally run a Twitter account called Debunk Trump. How destructively partisan is that thesis? It's not "Debunk Politicians" -- it's "Debunk This One Politician I've Decided I Don't Like." Please follow it, even though I'm sorta mocking the purpose for its existence right here in this paragraph.

Which, now that I think of it, is a great way to lead into my next point ...

Skepticism Is A Freakin' Blast

Think of the belief you're most passionate about. Now think of the people you disagree with. Congratulations: There's a Twitter account completely devoted to mocking them.

Think of another group you hate. Yup, there's a subreddit devoted to collecting all the stupidest things members of that group have said and picking them apart. Each post will have a quote from the dumbest believer in whatever philosophy you choose, and the posts below it will be a competition to see who can come up with the sickest burn. Sick burns, after all, are the most fun part of the politics. It's like an argument's orgasm. It's the closest our political figures come to just beating the shit out of each other on stage, though this election still has time to prove this sentence wrong.

Sick burns also do a great job creating the impression that everyone who disagrees with you is a gibbering lunatic. When I get outside my bubble and hang out with my friends who are Republicans or Libertarians, it takes only a few minutes of conversation to realize that they all want the same stuff as me, but disagree about how to get there. That's confusing and complex, and frankly sorta exhausting. It's way more fun to pretend that all your enemies are lizard people.

You Can't Say No To Everything

The difference between defining what you don't believe and what you do believe is everything. Any jackass can say, "I don't like terrorism, I want less of it" or, "Things are bad, and I want them great again." It's far harder to find something specific and good and real that you think will work and throwing yourself behind it. Doing the former takes no risk at all, while doing the latter risks everything.

Usually, this comes down to how you phrase your beliefs to yourself in your own head. Usually, people who say "yes" to harsher gun laws are really saying "no" to gun violence. Meanwhile, someone who supports gun ownership for home defense isn't saying "yes" to guns so much as they're saying "no" to intruders in their homes, since that's what defense is.

And everything Trump says is a "no" rather than a "yes." His "yes" to a wall along the border is really just a "no" to immigration. His "yes" to using the term "radical Islamic Terrorism" is really just a "no" to the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. (The number of whom aren't terrorists, by the way, rounds up to about 1.6 billion.) It's all fear and rejection. His entire campaign consists of the frightened ramblings of a child who has awoken in the night and timidly asked to crawl in bed with you.

That's a trap we can all fall into if we get scared enough. It's hard to look for real solutions. It's hard to want to fix rather than destroy. It's way, way easier to turn off the TV, delete the news app off your phone, and spend all day playing Pokemon Go.

J.F. Sargent is a senior editor for Cracked. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

For more insights about Donald Trump straight from his own ghostwriter's mouth, check out 6 Ugly Things You Learn About Donald Trump Reading His Books, and find out why Donald Trump's success was so hard to predict in 5 Ways We Got The Trump Campaign Wrong: An Insider Explains.

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