Stop pulling the Trump card

In recent months, presidential candidate Donald Trump has overwhelmed political discourse, drawing many reactions: contempt, celebrity fanfare, ironic dismissal and embrace among others. But no matter your angle of approach, his reception on the whole has been cacophonous and is a prime example of media coverage bordering on ludicrous, but the attention to him is hardly without cause. Rather it seems a direct consequence of the culture the New Yorker recently called “anti-politics.” It is a culture our generation is hardly immune from; in fact, it is a culture we help to enshrine.

Those who embrace Trump laud his air of authenticity and honesty. They cite his refreshing vitality against the politician willing to pander to any vote at any cost, but experts have already thoroughly inspected the “veracity” of the claims that have created this voter sentiment. We recommend, for instance, Politifact’s Truth-O-Meter, which categorizes 49 percent of his statements as false and another 19 percent as “Pants on Fire” inaccuracies. This track record compounds doubt as to whether his brashness should be conflated with authenticity and honesty.

Why else has the Trump phenomenon grown uninhibitedly? In a crowd of Republican hopefuls, he is a natural lightning rod for attention, simplifying the field for viewers and upping page views for media outlets. The media can start coverage earlier and more eye-catchingly with a news-sourced reality television show to eat up a summer of news cycles. But this reality show will have some far-reaching consequences with Trump largely influencing, if not controlling discourse in American politics, forcing other candidates to dance politically with him.

This phenomenon is not all on Trump. The moment was ripe for his taking. Part of this is the “anti-politics” politics essential to the coming election, reiterated by Ben Carson’s recent surge and evident in recent years of American political discourse. Trump represents the hope that America can take every political knot of a problem and cut through it. He offers to be the panacea: he says to give him ISIS, immigration and China and that he will fix it. The narrative goes on: I went to Wharton and am the only candidate on stage with success in the real world–the business world–so I must be uniquely qualified to solve America’s problems. All it takes is toughness. His answers reassuringly flatten the complexity of our nation’s problems.

The attractiveness of his approach to campaigning is not just political but a cultural phenomenon revealing misdirection in American values. If we pay the right price--maybe the core belief of this country that immigrants are essential to the American Dream–we can afford the leadership of one successful businessman. This seems like a devil’s bargain to us. We hold that politics need to be a process of communities working together to resolve seemingly intractable problems, a definitional quality of government, and not this radical protection of private interests from immigrants, from China and most of all, from politics itself. Engaging and changing politics does not mean oversimplifying them or avoiding them altogether.

This seems the most dangerous part of today’s political moment. Our generation, though not rife with Trump fans, is complicit. We ironize politics to the point of eroding its meaning. Our youthful disenchantment risks pushing away politics as a space for society to come together to solve broader problems for a broader good. Irony is an incomplete view. We cannot forget the essential nature of politics as communal and alienate ourselves from processes that rely on us. In other words, we make Trump possible.