It's voting season and I am a millennial voter!
I spend too much time on my phone, I don't watch television because Netflix and Hulu are superior in every way, I dream big and shoot far, and from an outsider's perspective, it may seem as though my head is in the clouds with no grounded sense of reality. That being said, obviously I don't live life the way the generations before me did, however, from observation of the generations before me, I am in no way less distracted than they are. I'd even go as far as to argue that I may be a little more in tune with the state of our current society than they are, because of where I allow my focus to lie.
Our political climate seems to be on a downward spiral that is depleting at a faster rate than global warming and Donald Trump, as much as we want to hate him, serves as the largest example of that. As much as mainstream media focuses on the threat of terrorism, from what seems to be a new, more threatening organization every year, the Ebola virus, which literally only affected four U.S. citizens in total at the time of all the hype, and Beyonce's honeymoon in Cuba, which I think we all can agree is far from a headline, none of them are talking about our country's divide. If you watch the news, it is blatantly apparent people from every corner of the country are not on the same page with how our government is being run. I am going to talk about these from my perspective as a millennial in this time period beginning with, "The Donald." (This is his actual nickname in this election. We are nicknaming candidates running for president.)
I saw a post on Facebook that focused on the amount of money each candidate has spent on their political campaigns this season; it showed Donald Trump spent the least amount of money, however, he also raised the least amount of money. After verifying the information was correct, my first question practically answered itself: how does businessman Donald Trump manage to take the Republican nomination without seeming to have spent a dime? Well, the answer is simple. Businessman Donald Trump knows how not to spend money and still gets what he wants seeing as that's how a business thrives. Trump, being an active user of Twitter, saw that people were upset, saw how well controversy does in the media, and decided to be the candidate that says all the things that the "little guy" was saying, and not being acknowledged for. Combine that concept with voters losing jobs without a reason, the "immigration problem" that seems to be taking all of the jobs, many citizens struggling to recover from our most recent financial meltdown, and the subtle racism that our society has been bred and raised on, and you have the formula for a cheap yet successful political campaign that actually lands you the Republican nomination for the general election.
As someone who is very interested in psychoanalysis, one thing I have noticed is that Donald Trump's supporters are not all violent, mean or racist, but a large portion is actually just ignorant to how government works because they've lost faith in our nation's politics up until the recent election. They shouldn't be judged for this because it's not their fault. The real issue is the fact that Trump has taken advantage of their ignorance and has promised to make changes that he cannot follow through on. After listening to many of Trump's lectures I've realized that Trump has no actual plan; as a businessman he wouldn't give his whole plan away, and as an aspiring politician, he doesn't have to. Very much like a fast talking infomercial, Trump guarantees change with broad ideas of how to bring about that change and when asked about how exactly he plans to execute these ideas, he restates the initial point that he made about that idea leading the interview in circles until the reporter has to move on to the next question.
Trump's presidency has two possible outcomes. Noting that he was a liberal up until this election, he is either playing with the entire country and will actually make change when he gets in office, or he will actually follow through with trying to pass the things that he's been campaigning, and potentially split the country in ways we haven't seen since the civil war. Trump is dangerous. He's power hungry and will stop at nothing to get what he wants. The mainstream media, being so caught up in fighting each other for ratings, have fueled his campaign with millions of dollars worth of free publicity and being as strong of a country as we are, there's a lot of attention on what's going on in our country. The things that he says upsets our allies and enemies, and seeing ISIS has already begun using his campaign speeches to recruit new members, who knows what kind of message they could try to send us if he got into the presidency. We need a leader who actually cares about how the country will be seen on a global scale rather than trying to manipulate the system to see how far he can take this campaign.
