This is literally how things work in Trump’s life. For him, working with institutions meant they “knew him” and he could get what he wanted out of them. Things get handed to him, and even when they don’t, he still takes them without paying and faces no negative consequences for doing so.
I came here to say the same thing. His whole life has been a series of people handing him everything he needs and never having to work for it. And even when he thought he was struggling because of the bankruptcies, people were willing to bend over backwards because he was worth millions and millions of dollars and he could bank on his name recognition alone. He’s totally out of touch with reality for the majority of Americans and couldn’t care less what their lives are like.
We have this every general election in the UK. Poor schmucks are browbeaten by interviewers about much a pint of milk costs as if the only thing determining whether someone is fit to be an elected representative (or heaven help us - Prime Minister) is whether they’ve memorised the price of dairy products.
All because Maggie made a point of being able to rattle the costs of groceries off at the drop of a hat.
And we all know she was so close to the working classes.
The point isn’t to force politicians to memorize the right answers.
The point is to have people that didn’t need to fake it.
I can’t feel bad for politicians who complain about the extra work of appearing human, if it’s only because they’re so far removed from daily experience in the first place.
And if course the next question that was asked was “what do you mean by ‘the businesses will work along?’” Surely there was a journalist who followed up on that statement, right? Crap! Nope, they all gave him a pass again for some reason.
And the reality is that most of the electorate don’t know these things.
Yes, lots of voters (or potential voters) do need that information but the reality is that many more do not, even if they are not ‘out of touch’ ‘elites’.
All these kind of questions do is, as you said, require prospective politicians to make sure they’ve undertaken the basic effort to acquire the information allowing them to pretend to be able to understand what life is like for ‘ordinary’ people.
In practice of course, any politican who can accurately answer the ‘price of bread’ question then just gets asked about some other product until they finally admit that they don’t know what two dozen eggs costs in Macclesfield (or what mushy peas is)
I think you might be surprised, as it’s not that unusual for high-profile politicians to have had normal lives in recent memory. The people they work for might be a different story though.
Anyway, I wouldn’t overinflate the significance of knowing the price of a loaf. I don’t, and I’m not a rich person. (I make my own bread now, which sounds thrifty but probably costs me north of $10 a loaf by any realistic accounting). We are fortunate to live in a time when only a (significant) minority of people have ever needed to choose between bread and milk for the week.
The thing we should ask of politicians is that they know those people exist, and are capable of hearing and understanding how things work for them. Sure, they’d understand better if they’d lived that life, but that’s true of chemical-spill victims, military veterans, cancer patients, small business owners etc. Elected representatives are responsible for many more lives than they can possibly understand from their own experience; to be any use, they need to be good at understanding lives they haven’t lived.
That isn’t what I’m saying. For some people, the “basic effort” of knowing about basic everyday life is zero.
An out-of-touch politician shouldn’t be expected to pretend anything.
Most of the electorate do their own shopping. Most people know super basic things about grocery stores, like that they don’t give rolling month-long credit.
The British press can make the answer to any question sound bad, but it’s not unreasonable to find out how bubbled and removed a particular politician is from the people they represent.
At the very least it’s needed to offset the politician’s own propaganda about how they wear cowboy boots everyday and eat doughnuts for breakfast on a plastic plate.
Is that a thing? I mean, I know about the cowboy boots (which by the way to foreigners just looks all kinds of weird - not that the kind of US politician or voter who cares about cowboy boots cares what Johnny Foreigner thinks).
But the doughnuts for breakfast thing is new to me. That sounds quite high income stuff to me.
Then again I’m old enough and European enough to think that doughnuts are a special treat food (especially US-style doughnuts which are magic and unobtainable).
Somehow that impression persists despite Krispy Kreme being everywhere these days.
Bankers as the caring, human heart of a community? Where would he have gotten that idea? Seems familiar…
Never mind that that the scene is framed by a bank run in the middle of an economic crisis, and The antagonist Potter is a doppelgänger for Trump himself, the important thing is that bankers will do anything for their depositors.
True, but he’s also an unscrupulous property speculator and builder of low-quality homes. Like Trump, he is defined by his ambition and ego and he lacks the empathy necessary to connect to the people whose lives he ruins. Unlike Trump, he is a fictional character, and he disappears when I close YouTube. Fiction is so much better than reality.
I’m sorry to have to tell you that President Lincoln never said that. What he actually said was: “Let them eat gateau.”, which is not really the same thing as cake.
