By Kruthika Rao
It was sometime this July that I finally found myself looking for Donald Trump interviews. The day's newspaper had a stray article about how despite being written off as a joke by the media, Trump had managed to stun naysayers by leading in the nomination race.
Stories such as these always have the ability to arouse curiosity. After all, who doesn't love an anomaly! Besides, having watched a few episodes of the apprentice back in the day, I found it hard to visualize the funny haired, garish businessman as a head of state.
The first interview that I came across was with Katy Tur of the NBC. It was a 29-minute interview, where Trump dominated the discussion. Be it gun violence, creation of jobs or "where Obama was born controversy", he scored brownie points on each issue.
I found it more believable when he said he would create jobs than when Hillary Clinton trashed his economic plan with carefully put together facts. Now as I revisit both these clips, I realise Trump used basic messaging.
He didn't confuse the audience with random names, jargons or number ridden facts, but instead he stuck to no more than four or five words to get a point across. He used short sentences, and spoke effortlessly bringing up the same point over and over again.
In comparison, Hillary's interview seemed strained, her smile fake and her sentences too long. Her position as someone already in the system made people uncomfortable. You sensed a familiarity that she displayed on television with the interviewers which was unnerving.
To cut a long story short, it felt hard to trust her as her entire persona seemed like one big charade. Trump on the other hand, despite the politically incorrect statements, insults and wrong facts seemed to at least show his real face to the American public.
I remember coming across a Jon Stewart episode one month into Trump's presidential bid where he breaks the myth of the trump phenomenon with a simple skit where he goes on to describe Trump as 'America's first openly asshole President!'.
Trump needs to be appreciated for this stance, America ultimately fell in love with this truth that he was not a nice guy. He questioned the need to be a nice guy to be an American President.
This was in stark contrast to the Obama campaign, which was an appeal to hope and spoke of an America, where everyone got along, and everyone was equally entitled to the American dream.
It was the ideal of a united America that Obama sold to the American people while Trump resonated with the realities of their time. He sold them the truth of life, that it is unfair and you need to play hard to succeed.
While a lot has been written about why Trump won on the lines of gaining the vote of the working class American whites, pandering to the fears of the working class and most commonly, his appeal in rural America.
What generally goes un-discussed is the sincerity of his appeal. However crude the messaging, Donald Trump won, because of the two candidates, he was the one, who came across truer.
The American people voted for the truth he represented in their lives that all is not hunky dory, that long found prejudices don't vanish overnight, that racism is still a reality, and that women continue to fight for their share in the world.
The Americans chose a mean leader because let's face it...it is indeed a mean world out there!