On April 11, 2016, presidential hopeful and business man Donald Trump visited my home city of Albany, New York. His trip was a part of his various New York rally's to gain Republican voter's ahead of the state's primary on April 19, and the Times Union Center was one of his stops. Although I have not yet made my decision on who to vote for, I rationalized that seeing Donald Trump speak could perhaps be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and at least provide me with a source of nightly entertainment. As his rallies have been quite controversial, I thought that they would bring excitement, and I truly was interested in watching the man speak.
So, after seeing Donald Trump speak for just short of an hour, what does he really stand for?
I honestly cannot tell you.
What I can tell you is his strong opinions on "Lying Ted Cruz," which is how he referred to his primary opponent a multitude of times. I know that Ted Cruz apparently does not like New York, according to Mr. Trump.
Referring to Senator Cruz, Trump said "He does not like New York, and he does not like the people of New York". He played quite a bit on the "New York spirit" and "New York values," as he is a native of New York City.
However, the City, the people's needs, and the people's attitudes are essentially an entirely different world than the much smaller capital of Albany. I struggled to see how these points correlated.
Next, Trump moved on to his Democratic rivals, calling Hillary Clinton 'evil' on more occasions than one.
Various times, he said that "anyone but Hillary" should be president, but obviously implying that the public's vote should be for him. Again, he used the term "liar" to define an opposing candidate. In regards to Bernie Sanders, Trump was slightly less harsh. In fact, Trump even admitted to agreeing with Sanders on a policy or two. But in case you briefly started to think that perhaps Sanders could be a viable candidate, Trump was quick to remind his audience that Bernie has some goods ideas, but "can't do anything" about them, or does not know how. Essentially, there is no correct candidate to place your vote for on either side but Trump.
What concerned me the most about Trump's rally is his constant demoralization of the United States as an entity. According to him, our economy is failing, our military is awful, our school systems are sub-par, our government is corrupt, and so on and so forth. In order to convince his followers to "Make American Great Again," he made the United States sound as terrible as humanly possible rather than to simply point out the sectors in which we should seek improvement. Do we really want a president with such harsh opinions on the state of our current nation? For some reason, his thousands of gathered supporters loved this.
In short, I cannot tell you what Trump's position on really, anything, is. Besides the occasional "build the wall" chant, what are Trump's policies? How will he fix our economy? How does he feel about equal wages? And how does he expect to force Mexico to pay for this wall? Perhaps if Trump had spent more time speaking about the issues, and less time on derogatory remarks about his candidates, the questions would be a little clearer.
