Before he started his presidential campaign, I can’t say I thought about Donald Trump all that much. I knew about the Apprentice and Trump Towers, but his name didn’t come up in conversation often and I can’t say my life was lacking anything for it. Nowadays, I think about Donald Trump a lot. I don’t have much choice; he’s everywhere. I walk to class in the morning and see someone wearing a Make America Great Again hat. I open a news app and read about another demographic he’s insulted. I can’t just get through my day without hearing his, or one of his supporters’ unsolicited opinions, so here’s mine: Donald Trump needs to end his campaign.
For someone whose whole platform revolves around him being a winner, Trump sure has done a lot of losing. He may be in the lead with delegates, but he has lost his fair share of states so far, Wisconsin, Utah and Colorado being the most recent. And all his talk of being a winner has led the media to hold a magnifying glass up to the many businesses he started. Trump Steaks: Failed. Trump Magazine: Failed. Trump University: Widely accepted to be a scam, and the target of multiple lawsuits. People had forgotten about a lot of those failures, but now that his campaign has brought them back into public consciousness, it’s unlikely that they’ll forget again. Donald Trump is really his own worst enemy in terms of protecting his brand.
You might say it’s a little unfair to conclude that just because he’s had failed businesses in the past, Trump isn’t fit to be president. I would agree. But business failures aside, Donald Trump just doesn’t seem to be a very good person, or a particularly competent politician. He keeps talking about this wall he’s going to build to keep Mexicans (who he has repeatedly referred to as rapists and criminals) out of the United States. He also thinks he’s going to get Mexico’s government to pay for it. I don’t know how or why he thinks that’s realistic. He’s made plenty of disturbing comments about women, including multiple sexual comments about his own daughter. He seriously suggested punishing women for seeking abortions a few weeks ago. Not to mention, he thinks banning Muslims from the US is a viable, reasonable counter-terrorism measure. How this is going to protect us (American Muslims included) from all the white mass shooters and domestic terrorists, I’m really not sure.
And because he’s running for president of the United States, all these comments are covered by news media around the world. People around the world are looking at the US with a mixture of amusement and horror. Donald Trump isn’t going to be able to come back from this. These comments are on the record, in videos and tweets and memes that won’t be forgotten or destroyed (even though Trump has indicated in the past that he thinks we can build a wall around ‘our internet’ just like the one he wants to build on the border). Whenever his campaign does end, people around the world will breathe a sigh of relief. Trump himself will have severely limited options. It’s hard to imagine people lining up to work with him after the beating his public image has taken during this campaign. Anyone who isn’t repulsed by him will still have to consider the fact that a lot of the rest of the country (and the world) is. I can’t imagine that after his campaign, public opinion of him will improve very much (especially as dropping out of the race would be yet another loss for someone who prides himself on being a winner). Dropping out would however help him cut his losses. If he’s lucky, he might return to the position he used to occupy in society’s collective consciousness rather than being the person we can’t stop talking about even if we don’t have anything nice to say. I think that’s worth bowing out early.
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