by Paul Henninger

“He says it like it is. He speaks the truth.” The most common explanation for Donald Trump’s appeal as a presidential candidate is that essentially that he speaks his mind. When you place his speeches, interviews, and sound bites along side of those of the competition, on either side of the political divide there is in arguably a stark contrast. Most national political candidates come across like they are some kind of poll-driven artificial intelligence. They stick to their talking points, they stick to specific phrases, and repeat them over and over again to incrementally grab sentiment. Trump’s appeal, on the other hand, seems to be that he just says what he really thinks about things. He really thinks that we should build a wall on the Mexican border. He really thinks we should create a safe zone in Syria.

There’s another way to look at the Trump appeal that is one that’s all to familiar to those of us looking for a solution to an extremely frustrating problem. And there’s no doubt that the American political system failure to make significant progress on critical issues like economic equality, education, and global security is extraordinarily frustrating. There’s a much more pedestrian problem that we all run into everyday that could put the Trump appeal in context in a better way. At least once a week each of us have some electronic device that we rely on for entertainment, for communications, for work, for play stop working. The rotating ball appears and won’t go away. The iPhone freezes up in the middle of at just the right moment in a game of Candy Crush. The cable box seizes up at a critical moment in Game of Thrones. This frustration is often followed by a call to tech support, to a tech savvy relative, to customer support. And once we’ve navigated past the maze of “Press 1 for…” etc., there is almost always a moment of epiphany: “Did you try resetting your device.” 90% of time the solution to a problem when a whole system freezes up is a simple reset. And even the most tech savvy among us will forget that from time to time.

In many ways the vote for Trump is a vote for a reset of the political system. Unplug the thing, wait 10 second and plug it back in. CTRL-ALT-DELETE. American frustration with the ineffectiveness of American politicians to make appreciable progress against the most basic problems we face is at a all time high. We just about done with a presidency that promised an upgrade based on Hope and failed to deliver (as most upgrades do). America is voting for a reset. And whether Trump is the guy for the job, it might just be time for one.