i'm serious when i say this: if i were voting my pure self-interest, i'd have to vote for trump. the main stake i, like most americans, have in the presidential contest is that i will have to watch the winner on television, every day, for at least the next four years. i have no idea how donald or hillary's agendas would affect my bottom line or whatever, and actually i don't think hillary has any agenda at all, except 'you won't notice me doing anything.' that's because i don't think she has any beliefs except that she should aggrandize herself. but i sure will have to watch her yapping robotically, and i long ago had way too much of that.
people keep howling that politics has become mere entertainment. no, it has always been entertainment, in large measure. now shit does happen. someone might take you into a disastrous war, for example. but you can't really know that ahead of time unless they're screeching it, which is unlikely.
anyway, i am not down with trump's nationalism, with walls or muslim bans etc. not at all. but again, if i were actually to vote only on my self-interest, it's obviously trump. you too, i'm thinking, probably, though maybe not. it's just that msnbc, cnn, and fox will be 24-hour saharas if she's elected. i'll know what she's going to say about anything at any time before she says it: it will be the safe thing, the polled thing, the empty thing, the consulted thing. it'll be all manipulation all the time, yet it will be unbelievably repetitive, predictable, contentless: just as though she is an idiot.