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Believe It Or Not, Donald Trump Is The “Most Admired Man” Of 2020
“That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. I’ve spent a large part of the past twelve months repeating that phrase to myself. In fact, if we define “strength” as a level of emotional numbness so profound that it feels as if nothing will disappoint, surprise, or spark a glimmer of joy within me ever again, I may now be the strongest man alive.
My capacity for despair has been so blunted by COVID-19, months of racial unrest, catastrophic economic collapse, and a literal plague of locusts, that when I heard that Donald Trump had won this year’s Gallup poll for “Most Admired Man”, honestly, I didn’t even flinch.
That’s right, the final dribble of lunacy from the firehose of horror that has been 2020, is the news that Americans are more likely to name Donald Trump as the man they most admire than any other man anywhere in the entire world. The result marks the end of Barack Obama’s record-equalling twelve-year reign in the top spot and ends an almost three-week run of personal faith in human nature.
When Gallup tallied up the votes, Trump got 18%, Obama got 15%, and nobody cares what anybody else got, because the takeaway here is that at least one-in-five Americans think more favourably of Donald Trump…