American Voters: The Dumb, the Disinformed, and Disillusioned

Abstract

An international audience watched the 2016 Republican convention with a mixture of fascination, horror and trepidation. The appearance of Rudy Giuliani, a quadrennial occurrence, was enough to make even the most objective of observers wonder how American politics reached such a sorry state. Ben Carson took to the stage and gave a speech that married together his two favorite subjects: evangelical Christianity and the demonization of Hillary Clinton. Trump closed out the fourth and final day of the convention with a speech that painted a frightening utterly fictitious-picture of a modern-day dystopia known as the U.S.A. Transfixed and utterly mesmerized by Trump; the audience listened attentively to 75 min of rambling, apocalyptic, verbal diarrhea. The billionaire mogul oscillated wildly between vitriolic hatred and erroneous facts, displaying a new level of demagoguery. The speech, the likes of which conjured up images of the Nuremburg Rallies, resembled a Monty Python sketch, minus the intentional humor.