This class could very easily become “Donald Trump: The Class” and while I do find that interesting, I’m hesitant to make work about the man. I just don’t want to give him the attention. I don’t want him to have any more press coverage. I don’t want to give him my time. I don’t want to spend the time with his digital presence that making the work would require. He is awful. I just don’t want to.
So, I started looking at material of the other candidates. I cut up some of Hillary Clinton’s testimony at the Benghazi hearings. But, listening to people say ‘Chris Stevens’ over and over again was somehow worse. I kept trying to make something that critiqued the act of using this man’s death for one’s own means, but I couldn’t do that without using his death for my own means. I can see that being a struggle for the rest of the semester. Critiquing video coverage of a topic in a video class without doing the very thing you’re objecting to may be harder than it looks. I put the Benghazi video away.
In the end I found myself back at Donald Trump. I realized that I really wanted to yell at him. I wanted to tell him that he is an idiot, a coward, and that he isn’t smart enough to be president. I wanted to point to him and say “Can’t you see that this man is afraid?”. I don’t think that the supercut I made does that, but I do like what it does. I cut together all his promises from one speech and then laid text over his face that says “Mr. Trump does not know how to get any of this done.” It’s not a particularly cutting observation, but it’s a start.