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Why Donald Trump is the Magic 8-Ball of politicians, according to Seth Meyers

Alex Abad-Santos
Alex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic.

Donald Trump has done a lot of amazing things this campaign season, from tweeting about taco bowls and gigantic walls to showing us that winning the Republican presidential nomination is easier than competing against Omaha steaks or Georgi vodka.

But perhaps the most daring of all his feats is how willing he is to flat-out lie, change his position, ostensibly perform some Jedi brain voodoo on his followers, and walk away relatively unscathed.

“I’m very capable of changing to anything I want to change into,” Trump said during an interview with Fox News on February 10.

You may or may not recall that four years ago, Mitt Romney was torn apart by pundits because one of his advisers said that calibrating a campaign for the general election was like shaking up an Etch-a-Sketch and starting over.

But Trump is far worse than an Etch-a-Sketch, Late Night host Seth Meyers pointed out on Monday, instead likening the candidate to a Magic 8-Ball. Shake Trump one day and you get one answer, Meyers said. Shake Trump another day and you get a completely different one.

During this election cycle, Meyers has been delivering some of the best Trump insults directly to the candidate’s face, and in his eight-minute segment on Trump’s Magic 8-Ball strategy, he traced Trump’s drastic flip-flopping on topics like:

  • The minimum wage
  • His tax plan
  • How Trump lauded himself as a self-funded candidate but now has hired a formal Goldman Sachs partner to spearhead fundraising for his national campaign

It’s jarring to hear how much Trump’s rhetoric changes when it’s replayed in quick succession. But as Meyers stated, the bonkers part of the entire situation isn’t that Trump is being a flip-flopping politician with no solid answers. It’s how other politicians in the Republican Party — many of whom have sworn never to back him, with some even comparing him to cancer — are now falling over each other to support the Trump, the Magic 8-Ball.

“There’s no way you could support someone like that for president, right?” Meyers asks.

As Meyers showed us, Trump isn’t the only one flip-flopping.


Why Donald Trump can’t win a general election

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