I've said before that when (some) people spoke of Trump, non-ironically, as a good speaker they weren't saying exactly what we thought they were saying.
The one thing, the one thing Trump gets about America in that shriveled, deformed, and misplaced third testicle that passes for his brain is that there was an unspoken, untalked about, desire among a lot of Americans to have someone, anyone, just talk to them in some language that wasn't political doublespeak, focus grouped B.S. There was a chunk of American essentially someone, anyone "Lie to me, insult me, just don't be a pussy. Don't talk the thing you said the second it polls poorly with a focus group. Be wrong, but be sure of yourself."
It's how Trump could stand in front of a crowd in Iowa, call them idiots, and win the state in a landslide while Hillary could stand up, lay a perfectly well thought out plan to get West Virginia off of coal as it's sole major industry, and someone do worst in West Virginia then Trump did with Mexicans after calling them rapists and killers.
Several political commentators have tried to make sense out of how it is possible for someone who provably and objectively lies with the consistency, frequency, and vigor that Trump does is so often heralded as his supporters as "being honest" or "genuine" or "keeping it real."
The best explanation for this is that "being honest" and all those other ways of phrasing it are actually trying to say I think is what many of them are trying to say is something slightly but importantly different.
Listen to any mainstream politician talk. Do you ever within a rounding error hear a politician speak in a public setting that wasn't the most inhuman, inauthentic, sound-bite ready, pre-prepared statement ever? A politician can't say hello to a baby without you just hearing the dozen of focus groups it was run through, the edges sanded off by multiple speech writers, the tone and context sifted through again and again.
And when they are done and finally speaking it sounds good, it sounds right, it sounds correct, it sounds beautiful, hell it even sounds honest for certain meanings of honest. What it doesn't sound like is authentic. Human. Off-the-cuff. Unprepared. Unfiltered.
When you work that hard to make sure you saying something the "right way" it never feel natural.
And I do think on some level people have been desperate for this authenticity. Politicians, even the ones we like, have felt so fake and phony for so long that when someone came along with LITERALLY NO FILTER people did gravitate to him.
Did you forget about the Korean war?
) reminds me of is how baffled Trump critics were that anybody could listen to his whining about everybody being against him and think "that's a manly man". The explanation that most of them never figured out was that, when one is attacked from all sides, just calling out one's opponents on their bad behavior is bolder than the perceived alternative, when the perceived alternative is simply cowering & hiding in silence against the attacks. Exactly what form the objection should take is just a secondary detail to the important point, which is to stand up to it in some way at all.
