Are we so surprised that the candidate that flooded news feeds with scandal was elected? This is the reality show era, where Taylor Swift’s love life shares headlines with the turmoil in the Middle East, where news outlets starve for clicks and views instead of news, and would sacrifice a quality story for a popular story.
Every, and I mean every, media outlet from CNN to Buzzfeed feasted on the awful things Trump said during his campaign. By lunch, there would be a new tweet, a new burn that Trump spat out and every homepage had an article up before the check came.
Twitter was plagued with reactions, Facebook videos were shared, and all the while Trump sat back and watched as we engraved his name on Facebook and Twitter trending lists.
According to metrocosm.com, by the end of the presidential race Hillary Clinton outspent Trump by almost $300 million. That’s because Hillary couldn’t, or wouldn’t, cause a firestorm with an ignorant tweet. But that’s where it’s made the difference.
In a New Yorker article titled “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All”, the true author of the book “The Art of the Deal” came clean and wrote an article reversing the golden image he painted of Trump. In short, he outed Trump as a grubby, heartless, sociopathic businessman. “Yet, to (Tony) Schwartz’s amazement, Trump loved the article. He hung the cover on a wall of his office,” the article reads. Schwartz goes on to say that this was because Trump was—is—obsessed with publicity and doesn’t care the about content, just that his name was getting passed around.
Introduce the Internet, the beast that feeds on scandal and the grotesque and propels trending topics into every screen of every corner of earth. Trump ruled the Internet for this presidential race, fed media outlets whatever bullshit he happened to think about at 1:30 a.m., and we ate it up and licked the plate.
Trump is exactly the kind of person built for this era. He understands that people will take a new season of “Breaking Bad” over reading through the Clinton emails, even though the emails are cost less to read (free). He gets that between the New York Times, the Washington Post or even the El Paso Times, people will get up in the morning and check Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and upload a selfie to Instagram.
Be upset that Trump won. Declare that he is not your president. But know that your passive acceptance of his name running all over your feeds let him walk into the White House. The media just wants the clicks and views, and because they felt that Trump’s scandals caused thumbs to tap their icon, they gladly wore their keyboards down to spell his name out.
Enough blame. The guy is president and it’s been a strange acceptance by all. Obama, in the first meeting with Donald Trump, told the nation that we are rooting for his success. It’s a hard thing, I know, but to say otherwise is even more dangerous. The man is our president now, and his success means our success as a country. For him to fail is to say America will fail. We cannot afford for him to fail because that will spell disaster for everyone.
This isn’t forgiveness, it’s a warning. We’ve seen Internet star Donald Trump and it is not pretty, but we owe it to ourselves to give him a chance to man up and begin leading this country to success. Hold him to a standard, but do not root for his failure. Lash out when he being childish, but do not condemn him for something he has not done yet. He still has an opportunity to be a good president, he just hasn’t shown us the fact that he’s capable of it yet.
