Like Andrew Jackson, Donald Trump is man who represents the age in which he lived. Whatever you may think of the age. Jackson embodied a generation of men who had risen and made their mark in a young country. He represented their desire for greater representation, even if it had costs for slaves and Indians. He represented their desire to wrest control of a nation’s institutions, which had been monopolized by a small patrician elite. Jackson was partly a product of a new print-media culture.
Donald Trump represented an age of celebrity, the age of endorsement deals. His is the age of cable-news addiction in old age and sharing opinions as a branding opportunity. He represents a social-media age, which fixes a digital sewage pipe to the brains of every single person on earth and allows the mental diarrhea to gush upon an unready world. He represented the fantasy of a moneyed elite that used to slum it in Queens, but has settled into a Manhattan penthouse.
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