John Alsop

Yeah, it's a super interesting term because it's at once authentic.

something that should mean something very simple right that someone is real or they're who they say they are or they sort of appear to be normal in some way but actually it's become loaded over a period of decades at least with a bunch of signifiers right so if someone's real self is that of kind of a boring political nerd who speaks in soundbites that isn't generally what's considered to be authentic

Rather, it's someone who appears to be outspoken or spontaneous or an outsider, someone in the classic formulation who you'd like to grab a beer with.

Yeah, absolutely.

He's kind of gruff and gravel voiced and macho, you know, has a big beard, has tattoos on his arms, works on a boat on the water.

Yeah.

He's also a white guy.

The concept of authenticity as a political construction has been criticized many times for being kind of racially coded as well, being easier for white candidates to pull off in a way that's legible to this consultant class.

He really sort of seems out of central casting in that regard.

I certainly think he is not a 2D stereotype of the gruff working class man who, you know, has sort of been plucked from total obscurity.

His grandfather was a leading architect and designer who sold these kind of quite high-end tables and chairs.

For example, Donald Trump actually owned a set of the chairs, which was a delightful detail, if that's the right word, that I found while I was reporting this piece.

As has been widely covered and discussed, Plattner went to a couple of elite schools.

He said that one of those was with help from a financial aid package.

totally divorced from those circles, albeit, as I mentioned earlier, I don't think really connected to them in a professional sense.

And so, yeah, he's not a guy who's worked on the water his whole life.

At the same time, I think he is someone who is complicated, and complication in someone's life is in some ways a claim to authenticity, right?

And I think in another sense also, he stands for authenticity in what I see as a slightly different sense to that which is

signified by the word as it's often used in in political media in that he is a guy who has lived a lot not you know not an unblemished life there have been these scandals that have come out and he sort of stands for the idea at least to him tell it that he has worked through those issues and become a better person and gone to therapy and worked on himself if there's one thing i can say i went to therapy for years i still go to therapy super helpful

It's this kind of broader, I guess, sort of more romantic idea in many respects of searching for his real self and kind of coming closer to finding it, which I think taps into sort of a different current of what is understood by authenticity than the one that the political media might mean.