When you talk to your dog, does your voice change? Say you’re scratching her belly and she gets that leg spasm of joy, do you give her the old “Who’s a good girl? Are you a good girl?” in a tone that you would never, ever use anywhere else? (“Who’s my chubby little assistant manager? Are you my chubby little assistant manager? Yes you are.”)
The “you” that uses that awful dog voice, the “highlight reel you” that shows up on Facebook, the “I-hope-the-other-moms-don’t-find-out-I’m-a-dork you” – all are constructed personalities that are by definition inauthentic. Most people have created dozens of versions of themselves, a personality for every occasion. When you actually meet someone who appears to have only one personality that they use all the time, you can’t help but be drawn to them.
Even when they come in the form of Donald Trump.
That’s not to say Trump is an honest-to-God straight-shooter (he isn’t), but he presents himself that way. When you watch Trump, you get the feeling he would use the same tone whether talking to prime ministers, voters or dogs. (“I’m going to play fetch with you, Fido. I will play a great game of fetch – nobody plays a better game of fetch than me, believe me.”)
It’s easy to imagine scenarios where that form of foreign diplomacy could go terribly wrong for the United States, but you have to give Trump credit for not letting handlers decide what he should say and how he should say it. Sure, Freud would have a field day with him, but he does seem pretty comfortable in his own skin. It’s hard not to admire that, especially as a journalist.
As part of the Monitor’s editorial board, I meet with all kinds of people: candidates for school board and city council, governors, senators, presidential wannabes, judges, CEOs, scientists, doctors, etc. Almost everybody is polite, even when we ask dumb questions or pointed ones. They are unfailingly earnest – not even their jokes, it seems, are meant to be laughed at.
But they are also largely inauthentic, as are their staff members.
That’s not meant to be insulting. Who wants a room full of journalists with recorders and notebooks to know what they really think? (Maybe Sen. Jay Bulworth, but he’s not only dead but fictional.) So an odd sort of dance takes place where interviewees know exactly what they are going to say before they walk through the door and we try to get them to say something – anything – that we couldn’t easily get from their website or stump speeches.
Often, that’s a fool’s errand. They are trained to not say more than they want to – to stick to the planned narrative – and most are very good at it. Voters who watch the presidential debates get similar treatment.
Panelist: “Do you believe we should ban Syrian refugees from entering the country?”
Candidate: “My father spent his whole life working double shifts in a shoe factory. He bowled on Friday nights and owned only one dress shirt that he wore to church on Sundays. It was blue with a frayed collar, but he looked like Dean Martin when he wore it. One year, he couldn’t afford to buy a turkey for Christmas dinner so he cut bologna into drumstick shapes and we were damn glad to have it. That’s what I would tell the Syrians if elected president.”
So forgive journalists for paying so much attention to Donald Trump over the past several months. It’s not every day that a politician comes along who possesses what sometimes appear to be human traits, even if many of those traits aren’t exactly admirable. Everyone makes fun of Marco Rubio for his notorious Robo-Rubio debate debacle, but his slip-up was just a hilarious caricature of what candidates at almost every level are trained to do (or learn the hard way to do). That is, no matter what question is asked, just stay on message.
If present and future politicians take anything away from the Trump phenomenon, I pray it’s not that sexism sells or that intolerance will get you elected. Instead, I hope they see that voters have evolved to the point where they want their politicians to be a little more human, a little more willing to say what they really feel even when it might rub some people the wrong way. I hope, too, that all of us will try to be a little more authentic in our own lives.
John F. Kennedy once said he felt sorry for Richard Nixon “because he does not know who he is, and at each stop he has to decide which Nixon he is at the moment, which must be very exhausting.”
Maybe that’s why so many of us – journalists, politicians and the rest – always look so tired.
(Dana Wormald can be reached at dwormald@cmonitor.com.)