John Alsop

He lied and continues to lie all the time, which is not, you know, a great thing if you're trying to use the word authenticity to describe someone.

And so, yeah, I think Trump was simultaneously, you know, someone who benefited from the decades-long construction of these sort of authenticity norms and at the same time benefited from telling people with a wink and a nod, these are hollow.

People call me a fake or a phony or whatever, but this system doesn't work for you and I can come in and maybe kind of out-fake and phony in them and smash it to pieces.

And

I think in his wake, you know, he has shifted the meaning of the concept somewhat as well.

I think that the way that

Authenticity has been constructed since Carter, which we talked about before, this idea of politicians you'd rather have a beer with.

Yeah, I think that has fed into a much broader political culture that is obsessed with quite superficial image construction over politics.

policy.

It structures who gets into politics in the first place and how those people behave during elections and then if they win in office.

That being said, I think my piece was about two different, connected but different, definitions of authenticity in politics.

This one that we've discussed, which is a construction of the consultant class, but another one that taps into, I think, a much longer term and more deep-seated

desire for people to like connect with what is what you know what they believe is real either in themselves or in the world around them and i kind of think there's something in that that's like an innate part of of being a human and i don't think you could sort of expunge that from politics