Authenticity

While the topic of the day seems to be Trump’s cabinet, I still can’t stop thinking about Trump’s victory on Election Day and why he won. The election of an American president is a very personal matter, and I truly believe elections usually boil down to which candidate is perceived as the more authentic.  And in this vein, being authentic means that someone or something is genuine, real, having an origin supported by unquestionable evidence, it is not false or copied; it’s authenticated, verified, representing one’s true nature or beliefs, and being true to oneself.  And Donald Trump was the far more authentic of the two candidates.

Meanwhile, a good argument can be made that Donald Trump is the most authentic president and presidential candidate we’ve seen in years and Americans know that he is the real deal, and why he won despite his negatives.  Voters understand that Donald Trump is who he is and that what you see is what you get.  And while the left is loath to admit it, that’s why Donald Trump won not only the Electoral College, but also the popular vote.

Ben Stein wrote a piece recently describing how the left tried to paint President-Elect Trump as a threat to democracy; a crazed would-be dictator hell-bent on seizing power and wielding it against his enemies.  But those aspersions didn’t resonate with the general public.  Donald Trump may have what Stein referred to as a magnetic charisma because when he rambles, he says things most politicians won’t but that voters want to hear, and the reality is that Donald Trump is himself, 100% of the time.

That’s what so many on the left missed in this election cycle, and why Kamala Harris lost – as Bill Maher recently said on his TV show, “I think America is perfectly willing to elect a woman. They just didn’t like the last two that were put up.”  It’s as simple as that.  It boiled down to one candidate being real and the other being a media construct.   As the saying goes, “you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” And the American voters were not fooled by Ms. Harris, who in this writer’s opinion is perhaps the least authentic presidential candidate the Democrat Party has put on a ticket since before World War II.

And speaking of authenticity, do you know who else knows that Donald Trump is authentic – Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Ali Khamenei, which is why the geopolitical calculus from Tehran to Pyongyang is being reexamined.

Donald Trump moved the needle across every demographic in America from New York to Georgia, while expanding his coalition with minorities.  So, love him or hate him, Donald Trump knows America because he loves America, and I’m neither being hyperbolic nor corny.  The left ridiculed him for serving fries at a McDonald’s take-out window, but the voting public instinctively knew he wasn’t pretending to be a blue-collar guy.  Rather, he was showing America that he respects traditional American values, something Kamala Harris was simply unable to do because she’s the antithesis of genuine.

C’mon, let’s call it like it is, Kamala Harris was chosen to ‘lead the party’ in name only while her handlers that include a mixture of Biden and Obama stalwarts supply the operating manual, and if you doubt that statement, watch how quickly she fades into political oblivion on January 21^st, 2025.

Stein was spot on when he wrote, “Americans saw through her.  They saw that her celebrity-flecked candidacy of pseudo-excitement, was just another iteration of the Democratic Party’s playbook: transgressive values disconnected from traditional American family values. Harris ran on a peculiarly insular view of the economy that believes a government handout can make up for expensive groceries and declining prospects; an arrogance rooted in the supposed superiority of a pseudo-intellectual self-appointed nobility—a nobility that scorns achievement and holds an anti-American sense of our country’s history and role in the world.”

American libertarian conservative writer and political commentator George Will would often speak of the collective wisdom of the American people, and the results of the 2024 election bear that out.  The democrats had the money, and they had the media – what they lacked was an authentic candidate.