You like Trump, I like Trump, everybody likes Trump for president!
Donald Trump’s latest campaign ad, which he released on Twitter Saturday night, is strange in that it does something modern campaign ads so rarely do: It provides insight into the true character of the candidate.
Clocking in at just 28 seconds, it is a collage of silent footage of Trump’s speech at the Republican Convention in Cleveland on Thursday. As the images cut in and out, the words onscreen say the following: “75 MINUTES TOTAL SPEECH TIME,” “24 MINUTES TOTAL APPLAUSE,” “33% TIME SPENT APPLAUDING.” (Which is wrong—it’s 32 percent.) The screen fades to white, and then the Trump-Pence logo appears.
Compare this with Hillary Clinton’s latest ad, called “Dear Donald Trump,” which features a collection of regular folk—a small child, some women, and some men, all of varying ethnic backgrounds—lecturing the Republican candidate about how his ideas and values are not representative of their own. Clinton herself does not appear.
Or even compare it to any number of the ads produced during the last two general elections, by Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Barack Obama.
In 2008, a Harvard Law professor talked about how inspiring Obama was and Sen. Claire McCaskill testified that he knew how to get things done in Washington. In another, a narrator made the argument that Obama could “restore America’s place in the world and people’s faith in our government” while uniting all people in the common quest for hope and change.
And John McCain looked warmly into the camera while he promised to do better than “the last eight years” of George W. Bush. “We need a new direction and I have a plan,” he said. In another clip, a narrator labeled McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, “the original mavericks” who will “make history” and “change Washington.”
In 2012, Obama used his ads to fact-check Romney’s debate performance and impale him for his business record of outsourcing jobs overseas. Meanwhile, Romney enlisted a blue-collar man to criticize the president for his “you didn’t build that” gaffe and hammered him for appearing weak on the world’s stage.
There is a common denominator here, if you hate yourself enough to watch them all: These ads, even when they are laser-focused on needling the opposition, are about something greater than the candidate him or herself. They’re about the country which the candidate seeks to lead. And even when the ads reference the good values and respectable nature of the candidate in question, we learn very little about who these candidates actually are as people because of that first thing, because that’s what’s understood the campaign-commercial-viewing public wants to hear about.
Trump’s new clip is different.
First of all, it’s not a sleek, expensive production—Trump is notoriously cheap, and he has not thus far invested in traditional methods of campaigning, like glitzy commercials with primetime TV slots. It’s a shoddy production in large part because of that, and surely also due to the speed with which it was produced (48 hours after the speech).
But in just 28 seconds, we learn more about who Trump is than in dozens of ads produced by Clinton, Obama, Romney, and McCain.
“75 MINUTES TOTAL SPEECH TIME,” “24 MINUTES TOTAL APPLAUSE,” “33% TIME SPENT APPLAUDING”—that’s all you need to “get” Trump.
As a politician, Trump is not unique in his desire to be loved and accepted, of course. Most sensible people would stop at town councilman or state legislator if ego didn’t have something to do with their desire to serve the public. In 1952, Citizens for Eisenhower released an ad that consisted of some cartoon white people singing, “You like Ike, I like Ike, everybody likes Ike for president!” But to say Trump is driven by ego wouldn’t be going far enough.
You really have to take a moment to appreciate how utterly bizarre it is that, after winning the Republican nomination—the thing hardly anyone thought he could do, the thing he wasn’t even sure he could do—Trump only cares about ratings, like he doesn’t recognize the difference between starring on NBC’s The Apprentice and possibly becoming leader of the free world.
“75 MINUTES TOTAL SPEECH TIME,” “24 MINUTES TOTAL APPLAUSE,” “33% TIME SPENT APPLAUDING”—you are kidding yourself if you think Trump did not personally order some poor idiot on his staff, probably Dan Scavino, to watch the speech again and crunch those numbers.
Trump has no values, no internal world, no sincere desire to make concrete changes to this country to fix what supposedly ails us, he has only a primal need to know how long people cheered for him and how big of a deal that length of time is, given the total time of the event in question.
If Trump had a thought-bubble floating above that glorious mane, it would say the following: “75 MINUTES TOTAL SPEECH TIME,” “24 MINUTES TOTAL APPLAUSE,” “33% TIME SPENT APPLAUDING”—and then it would burst.