Here's a message for everyone at the K show: Talk to me about machinery. Talk to me about plastics processing. Talk to me about business.
But don't talk to me about American politics. Stop! I don't wanna talk about it!
Don't ask me about Donald Trump. Don't ask me to explain why Trump is so popular in America. I don't want to talk about it!
The U.S. presidential election is Nov. 8, less than three weeks away. Thank God my hotel TV here in Düsseldorf doesn't have any English-language stations. No CNN. Take me away from the crap in the United States. The K show is a vacation! (Editor's note: Get to work, Bill. This isn't a vacation.)
Trump represents angry white men who want the coal mines to reopen, who blame foreigners for taking their jobs, who want to blow up the political system. It's similar what you heard from the pro-Brexit people.
But a President Trump could get pissed off and launch a nuclear war.
Donald Trump is embarrassing to me as an American. And here I am at a major international trade show just before Trump faces Hillary Clinton in what has to be the most rotten choice in any presidential election since I first began voting in 1980. Or maybe, probably, the most-rotten in U.S. history.
But it's not the first time.
At the 1998 K show, then-President Bill Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal was going on. Clinton had a sexual relationship with the young White House intern. The month before the K show, independent counsel Kenneth Starr issued a report to Congress that accused Clinton of lying under oath about the tawdry relationship.
So there I was, an American at the K show. Everyone was asking about Monica Lewinsky. I spent one day at the Taiwan pavilion, and got asked again and again about it. When I started blasting both Clinton and much of the U.S. political system — explaining how embarrassing it all was — I could tell the Taiwanese business leaders were getting uncomfortable.
Message: Most of the world looks up the United States, and people don't want to hear an American — even a journalist — saying American is going down the toilet.
So to repeat: I just don't want to talk about it.
Then back in March of this year, Plastics News was down in Mexico City doing a daily newspaper for the Plastimagen trade show. Trump was saying that that, if he becomes president, he would build a wall on the southern U.S. border — and demand that Mexico pay for it.
Trump said that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists.
So we're in Mexico at a big trade show. My first time in Mexico since the early 1990s. Bad timing!
So again, I told any Mexican who asked why this man was so popular in the United States: Don't ask me about Trump. I don't want to talk about it.
So here we are in Düsseldorf. Let's talk about injection units, all-electric molding machines, in-mold labeling, anything — except what's going on in the United States, because….
I just don't want to talk about it.
Bregar is a Plastics News senior reporter. Follow him on Twitter @Machinerybeat25.
