I’m really, really sorry to bring politics up. But this is pretty dang interesting.
Someone restaged the 2016 Trump-Clinton debates with an actress playing the role of the former and an actor the latter. The assumption, of course, was that “the gender inversion would confirm…that Trump’s aggression—his tendency to interrupt and attack—would never be tolerated in a woman, and that Clinton’s competence and preparedness would seem even more convincing coming from a man.”
That’s the thing about assumptions, though: they’re often wrong. Joe Salvatore, one of the people behind the production, explains:
We heard a lot of “now I understand how this happened”—meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman—that was a theme. One person said, “I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.” Another—a musical theater composer, actually—said that Trump created “hummable lyrics,” while Clinton talked a lot, and everything she said was true and factual, but there was no “hook” to it. Another theme was about not liking either candidate—you know, “I wouldn’t vote for either one.” Someone said that Jonathan Gordon [the male Hillary Clinton] was “really punchable” because of all the smiling. And a lot of people were just very surprised by the way it upended their expectations about what they thought they would feel or experience.
I don’t bring this up to score political points one way or the other, but simply to point out—as this exercise seems to demonstrate—that Trump won the election not because of racism or sexism or jingoism or whatever -ism gets your dopamine levels to where you need ’em to be, but because he delivered a message that people responded to. And because, well…Clinton was a less-than-likable candidate.
Or maybe it all just comes down to this:
