The 2016 presidential race is unlike any race before for a few reasons. Hillary, Bernie, Trump, and Cruz are enough alone to set this race apart from its predecessors, but it’s the manner and the style in which this race is being conducted that are so unprecedented.

After Obama’s final White House Correspondent Dinner that essentially was just a massive roast of the biggest players in the game and his final “fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you I’m out” speech, it became pretty clear that politics, and C-Span, are no longer just for the stuffy, suit-wearing, golf-playing old men. His speech was very clearly more entertainment than politics. Instead of practiced and controlled speeches like Nixon's Checkers or Clinton's 1996 State of the Union, his speech writers seemed to come directly from the SNL staff. In fact, the current SNL writers were probably watching that thinking, "Well fuck, we have nothing to write about this. He already made fun of it all." When the President steals SNL's comedic thunder, one kind of has to take a step back and reflect on how we've gotten here as a nation. Politics has always been a game of responding to social climates, or at least it has been for the winners, but today’s social climate mandates that sort of adaptation much more rigidly than before. Look at Hillary; she’s fiercely fighting to connect with young voters, but as Obama said, “it's more like she’s your old relative who just joined Facebook.” Trump was made for this climate; or even more truthfully, this climate made Trump.

More of a persona than an actual person, Trump's campaign clearly began as a publicity stunt, trying to draw business back to his hotel industry, and is probably as surprised and scared as we are that he's gotten as far as he has. His debating style is easily quantified as yelling and arguing as opposed to actual debating, which has "won" him a large majority of media attention. His flashiness catches the eye of viewers, in turn focusing more cameras on him. The more time he spends in the limelight, the more he embellishes his words and bullies his candidates. It's similar to the high school bully who didn't have any real points but the more his cronies snickered, the more enthused his attacks became. With his political platform defined by his current mood, he's the biggest threat to national security we really have. After threatening to sue Grayson Carter, editor for Vanity Fair, in 1988 for making fun of his tiny hands, it's scary in an almost comical sense to imagine him trying to sue Kim Jong-Un after a disgruntled political summit. Almost comical, but far too possible for the idea to actually contain any humor. To an untrained eye, it would seem as though he based his POTUS campaign off of the President from Idiocracy. Trump has flourished under the new era of media consumption, where the most viewed videos are soundbites and most read articles begin with the title, "10 Reasons to ...".

Cruz, on the other hand, just couldn’t adapt to the new form of politics quickly enough and that, along with his actual political platform, was the nail in his presidential coffin. Cruz grew up in a very different era of politics, but unlike the other candidates, did not have the elasticity to encompass the many new platforms campaigning is being run on. Cruz played it safe in the beginning when it came to fighting back against Trump, thinking that being courteous was enough to gain respect in the face of a verbal attack. When Trump brought his wife into the melee, Cruz fought back, and continued to fight back against Trump. The only problem was that the fights were happening on a platform that Cruz and his team didn't know well enough to win on; Cruz never learned how to stand up to a meme. Trump dominates social media, with a high active Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook page. His integration of the three main social media platforms made him a lethal opponent for Cruz, and a perfect example of the transformation of new-age politics.

One thing Obama did get very right in his final Correspondent Dinner was that even though journalism is a dwindling profession, we need to continue to dig deeper and convey truths, and not let the laziness of flashy media and pre-digested news outcompete in-depth information. We can’t let ourselves become lackadaisical or apathetic when it comes to being informed. As long as BuzzFeed and Facebook news constitute a majority of the main sources of information, that’s what’s necessary for politics to adapt to. And that’s the exact formula for a having businessman with no legal experience be the last contender for the presidential bid for a major political party. It’s not enough to feign dismay that this is our reality; this reality is a direct result of our choices and us.