The Uncanny Valley, or Why I'm Grateful For Donald Trump

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Why do people like Trump?  Is it because he's honest?  Because he's independent?  Because he's tough?  Because he has help from wizards?

OK.  So maybe he lies his ass off, maybe he's not funding his own campaign anymore and maybe he's hilariously self conscious about the size of his fingers. But I don't care about any of that, because everyone knows all of that and nobody else cares.  

But I think I know what's really going on here. When people talk about Trump being honest or genuine or tough, what they're really talking about isn't what he's saying, but how he says it. Or, rather, how he doesn't say it.  Trump doesn't speak like a politician, and even though that alone should bury him, he is winning so much that I'm tired of his winning.

Intentionally or not, Trump is the harbinger of Ragnarok in American politics. He's taken the traditional trope of the American politician and smashed it with a fucking sledgehammer. The vast majority of politicians have either turned into archetypes, the same types of people wearing the same suits and the same gigantic American flag pins.

They may say different things, but they speak in the exact same way. Politicians, as we think of them, use the same inflections and gestures.  They relate everything to universal truths or allegories. Before this election cycle, the delivery of the same repetitive message was essentially formulaic.

And sure, there might have been some tremors at the base of the GOP before this. The rise of the Tea Party and the slow exodus of the hard-line evangelicals from the pulse of popular right-wing politics might have caused a minor fracture, but there was more than enough duct tape to fix it all up, or at least hold it together until the end of the Obama presidency.

Just run the playbook. The GOP, being the ones who invented this shtick, thanks to the hard work of people like Frank Luntz, were the ones who stuck to it the hardest.  

And why not? Selling the work of today's Republican congress isn't so much like selling policy as it is selling the fecklessness of their political opponents. All the GOP needed was somebody to rally the troops.

At first, it was supposed to be Jeb Bush, who had amassed an ungodly sum of money long before he even announced his candidacy, even though there never really seemed to be anybody who both A. knew he existed and B. was willing to forget his big brother's presidency existed. Watching the video where Trump bitch-slaps Jeb over his brothers quest for mythical WMD's, you can actually see the look of death in his eyes- sheer panic, and then a calm, a sense of the inevitability, where even he realizes it's over. His eyes glaze, his life flashes before his eyes, and the soul of his political ambitions collapses and then ejects into the ether.

From there, we basically ran past the blink-and-you-missed-it cameo of Marco Rubio, the little engine who almost could. Being a young, good looking Cuban dude was more than enough to build the confidence of the Republican base in Florida.  But not on the Presidential level.  You need an angle. He totally could have pulled it off, too- a little more pandering via establishment talking points (gun control or tax code reform would have worked like gangbusters, but all anybody got was nothing. I figured he would have at least championed something small like “Christmas v. Happy Holidays,” but what the hell do I know? Like the senator, I'm probably dehydrated.)

Then things got as weird as anyone thought they could get (at the time.)  Dr. Ben Carson, renowned Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at John's Hopkins University Hospital, surged ahead, then went bat-shit crazy faster than the time it took to read this sentence. There's always a screwball candidate, and sometimes the guy who tried and failed to convince people he stabbed somebody is the guy who gets to enjoy the limelight.  If nothing else, it gives us all a break from people who are peddling a more nuanced brand of lunacy.  It was like taking a Jaegerbomb in between two Maker's Mark Manhattans.

Was John Kasich there? I feel like he was, right? Rand Paul rings a bell, maybe... Bobby Jindall? 

I remember Chris Christie.  He's currently on a quest to become Trump's VP by way of being his last resort booty call.

It was all supposed to lead us to Ted Cruz. He was the Frankenstein's monster of his party's ideals: An educated, intelligent, articulate person who could take their fight to the Democrats at the public stage. Here was a guy who previously clerked for a Supreme Court justice, and also previously ate bacon cooked on the barrel of a goddamn machine-gun. The pendulum was primed to swing back at Democrats- who, in the grandest ambitions of their opponents, were supposed to be the metaphoric stand in for the typical, elitist politician.  They just needed Cruz to remain somewhat relatable to the voter base and safe from other Republicans (most of whom seem to think that he's a piece of shit.)

And then: like an unholy orange ray of doom, a bottom feeder celebrity in the form of a chimpanzee with worse hair and nothing better to do than say “fuck it” and run for Pesident, descended an escalator and announced his candidacy while declaring, with certainty, that Mexico was sending drug dealers and rapists to the United States. And then he got more popular than all the other candidates combined.  (He's also currently gaining momentum with Hispanics.)

So how the fuck did this happen?  I can tell you.

Politics has hit the Uncanny Valley.  Put simply, once something with human likeness starts approaching perfection, at some point it stops being interesting, and starts becoming appalling.

See the "Zombie" tag on this diagram?  Trump has put everyone else right there.

By Smurrayinchester - self-made, based on image by Masahiro Mori and Karl MacDorman at http://www.androidscience.com/theuncannyvalley/proceedings2005/uncannyvalley.html, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2041097

Everyone of voting age has been around the current media cycle to know what a politician “sounds” like, or, say, what our bosses "sound" like.  Growing up, we are supposed to imagine that our bosses are all going to look and act like Ed Rooney or Bill Lumbergh, only to find out they're (mostly) not caricatures of power hungry pencil-pushers. When you meet your bosses, you find out that they're kind of like you: they have problems, and families, and rent to pay and shit to do. They don't always look spectacular.  They're real people. 

But politicians aren't regular people.  Not anymore. Their families are carefully cultivated. They give millions of dollars to people who help them decide what to wear, how to walk, talk and stand. And who knows? For the most part, it could be well intentioned. Perhaps the majority of them are simply trying to approach the largest number of people possible because they have the best ideas to implement in the place they live.

In one moment, it all went to shit. With no warning to soften the blow, it became apparent that all those countless hours and countless dollars did was create facades that are the antithesis of what connects with real, actual, breathing human beings.  Politicians have hit the uncanny valley, and since there aren't any real people left, some of us started cheering for something much, much uglier.

No political counsel, no campaign manager, no force on earth or heaven could possibly have a plan for Hurricane Trump. How could they? These people have spent their entire careers, and to some extent their entire lives, praying and sacrificing to the gods of public relations to know what to say and when to say it. They spent thousands of hours studying issues, reviewing policy, and meeting important people. They got to where they were because they were the best at portraying politicians.

They were the kids in chess club, and suddenly there was Trump: the new, gigantic kid from out of town who flipped over their tables and decided that everyone was going to play Monopoly by the rules he made up half an hour ago.

(Sidebar: It's only now occurring to me that there is some serious sexism in the media's handling of Trump and Carly Fiorina. When she made the outlandish claim about a fictitious taping of secret brain harvesters working at Planned Parenthood, the media debunked it and everyone moved on. But when Trump says [insert anything he's said here] it's a fucking story? What's the difference? If Trump made that kind of bullshit claim, people across the country would be dancing on the ashes of every abortion clinic in the continental states.)

But goddamn if it didn't work. People love the guy. Enough people love the guy so much that it's tearing apart the same political party that won the absolute fuck out of everything two years ago.

You couldn't publish a list of everything wrong with Donald Trump online without needing to rent an entirely separate server. He's a stupid man doing stupid things for stupid reasons and I hope his campaign gets put down hard, the sooner the better. But I'm still thankful for Trump. 

Because for all of the things he's done wrong, he's doing something incredibly right- he's destroying the efficacy of the trope of the American politician. Everyone who craves power via a carefully crafted public persona now realizes that what's important to people is somebody who is using their actual brain to come up with actual solutions, even if the brain belongs to a terrible person with awful ideas.

We should all be thankful for Trump, because he's shown us who we all are. Now, it's time for him to fuck off, and every other politician to take off the masks and show us who they really are.

Sam lives in Austin, TX, and is trying to say "President Trump" without vomiting.  Follow him on twitter, or send some hate mail to swellbo@gmail.com.