The Onion's Co-Founder Scott Dikkers Thinks Trump Will Take The White House
Long before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, The Onion co-founder and comedy writer Scott Dikkers penned a guide to living in a country governed by America's first orange president. Of course, now that we're only a few weeks away from the Republican convention, Trump's America: The Complete Loser's Guide is all the more prescient. We sat down with Dikkers to discuss Trump's meteoric rise, his chances in the general election, and the state of satirical news today.
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Are you surprised by his success? No, I knew it all along. That's why i did the book. There was just never any question to me that he was at least going to get the nomination, and I frankly think he's going to beat Hillary Clinton if she's the nominee. I think he's going all the way.
Why do you think he's going to beat Hillary? Because he's a winner [laughs]. By that, I mean his self-identity as a winner runs so deep in his psyche that he will stop at nothing. You saw how surgical and effective he was at eliminating his other competitors, just slapping them down anytime they even got close to him during the fight for the Republican nomination. He's not going to do anything different with Hillary. She represents the establishment. This is his moment and I think this is really gonna happen.
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But how can Trump win a general election when he, say, tweets a photo of himself eating a taco bowl on Cinco de Mayo with the tagline, "I love Hispanics"? I think the punditry, and I guess I would count myself in that class—the intellectual class of people who follow the news and comment on these things and are sometimes shocked and outraged by the crazy things that Donald Trump does—we are in such a tiny, tiny minority. This is Trump’s brilliance, he understands this. Most people do not follow the news, they don’t care what the news says, they don’t believe a lot of what’s in the news, they have extremely short attention spans, and I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, they are incredibly stupid. They’re the great unwashed.
And that’s his fan base. That’s his fuel, that’s where he’s deriving his power. He turned out a lot of them—Republican participation in the primary elections is way up. Because he’s brought a lot of people out of the woodwork. And I think he’s going to continue to do that. I don’t think he needs traditional coalitions or any of that other stuff. I think he’s going to do such an effective job of slapping Hillary down and competing against her that he’s going to blunt—you know, her support isn’t that enthusiastic as it is. She’s very much just another establishment Democrat, that’s what we always get. There’s not a lot of Hillary fervor.
So he’s going to take full advantage of that leverage and he’s going to slap her down, and he’s going to use all his wiles and all his charms he’s already used to go from being a fringe clown to being the Republican nominee and getting well over a good percent of the Republican vote in his recent states, to squeak one out.
http://gothamist.com/2016/05/16/the_onions_co-founder_scott_dikkers.php
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