Extraordinary Experiment: What if Hillary and Trump Switched Genders

What if we saw Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump with Fresh Eyes?

Of course, we cannot.  Trump and Clinton were very familiar to us when we saw them at their televised debates.   

Click to watch: Two minutes

But what if. . . ?

What if we could see their debate--and more generally see them speak and interact when played by actors, which helps us experience them as fresh faces, thereby disassociating them from all the things we know and hate or love about the candidates.

Professors at NYU set up exactly that experiment.

And they did it by switching the Trump role to a woman and the Clinton role to a man.  Above is a shot from the rehearsal and two minutes of video of the rehearsal.   It is worth the two minutes of your time.   I urge readers to watch it before I share my own observations since I do not want to prejudice your own thoughts.

OK, here it is.

I liked the Trump character, as played by the woman above, far more than I liked watching the real Donald Trump in live action.   And I thought the Hillary character, played by the man, sounded more irritatingly prim and stuck in his political posturing than I remember feeling when I witnessed the real Hillary say the same words.   The woman playing Trump seemed animated, yes, but genuine.  The man playing Hillary seemed composed, yes, but calculating and un-genuine.

The ongoing subject matter of this blog is success and failure in political messaging.  This bit of video is helpful to students of the past election and to candidates and observers of future ones.  There is something appealing about apparently earnest advocacy.  Candidates who appear to calculate and parse out political positions on narrow grounds of policy look untrustworthy.

To my eye the Trump-character's interruptions did not seem particularly bullying nor impolite when depicted in this video.  They struck me as spontaneous.   

NYU story: Click Here

The authors of the study thought they were analyzing gender and their hypothesis was that Trump's behavior would come across as "shrill" when voiced by a woman, and indeed that the real Trump could get away with dominance behavior that a woman could not.  They, too, were surprised.    

My own sense is that the portrayal is less about gender and more about simply removing Trump/Clinton pre-conception baggage from the debate.   This has a longer term implication for Donald Trump.   Trump created a big, big brand.  Trump has his staunch fans--currently supposedly about 37% from the polls.   It could well be that Trump's actual behavior would be more popular if it were performed by anyone but Trump.  Trump made his enemies, and whatever Trump does will be seen as Trump.  

It was enough to make him president but it may not be enough to make him a successful one.