President Donald Trump’s political brand is based on convincing unexceptional people that they are better than they actually are, but one critic says he's doing so at the expense of exceptional people who happen to belong to marginalized communities.
“Donald Trump is literally hypnotizing mediocre people into thinking that they are meritocratic geniuses, while telling highly accomplished Black, Brown, and Asian people that they are nothing — that everything they have was given to them by those same mediocre people,” liberal commentator Joy-Ann Reid said on Tuesday in an episode of “The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali and Joy-Ann Reid.” The pundit elaborated that Trump and his administration promote the idea that white men do not need to prove their merit because, by virtue of being white men, they are already exceptional.
“They're literally seeing a deficit of white men even trying to go to college now, because they're being told: you don't have to do anything, you just have to be,” Reid said. “You just have to exist as a white man and you're qualified to do anything. You can be a neurosurgeon — just walk in there, use your brilliant European brain, and start operating on people. You're fine. You don't need to know anything. But Black people, according to the late Charlie Kirk, can't even be a pilot — even after going to school to become one. If they're sitting behind the wheel of a Cessna, the claim is they don't know how to do it, that they were just pulled off the street and thrown into the chair.”
Not only do these arguments hurt ordinary people by encouraging discrimination, Reid argued; they also hurt the American economy and do damage to the government when second-rate leaders inevitably stumble at their jobs.
“So they're telling women and people of color: you're not qualified to do anything. But white men are being told: you're qualified to do everything," Reid said. "So you're having people walk into positions they're not ready for. This is Donald Trump doing exactly what they claimed affirmative action did to Black students — setting them up to fail by placing unqualified people in positions beyond their preparation. That was their theory. And that's literally what's happening to these mediocre white guys now.”
Reid offered up the Trump administration as the clearest example.
“RFK Jr. cannot help but fail because he's not qualified for the job,” Reid said. “Pete Hegseth cannot do anything but look like an idiot because he's not qualified for the job. When you're not seeking the most qualified people, you're setting all of these men up to fail — including the President of the United States.”
Reid is not alone among liberal pundits who argue that Trump’s appeal relies in part on elevating mediocre men into believing they are great. Salon writer Amanda Marcotte made a similar point in July on “The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent.”
“So much of the MAGA movement really is driven by this jealousy that they can’t admit to themselves,” Marcotte said. “…I think you see that come up again and again with these fascist movements, right? They are full of mediocre people who are burning with resentment and grievance toward people that they call ‘the elites,’ who are often just people that are more excellent than they are, who are better at stuff than they are. They hate them and they just want to punish them.”