Barbie Jeep Girl Is Like Donald Trump For College Students

Richard Read

There are many things I don’t understand.

I don’t understand why people wear camouflage in public, where it has exactly the opposite of its intended effect. If people really wanted to blend in, they’d have better luck dressed as Mayor McCheese.

I don’t understand people who guzzle shots of liquor. That’s only “drinking” in the same way that sipping Soylent is “eating”. If you’re going to drink booze, make it a long-term commitment.

And while I do understand Donald Trump, who has miraculously managed to upstage every Kardashian on Planet Earth and regain the title of “America’s Biggest Attention Whore”, I don’t understand the people who seriously support him as a candidate for president. Putting the man whose favorite line is “You’re fired” in charge of the U.S. economy? Have Republicans thought this thing through?

Trump’s allure, so far as I can tell, is that he’s a showman — a sloppy, bilious, bloviating showman with a copyright-able mound of glistening “golden” hair. He’s good with soundbites. He’s good at drawing attention to himself. I’m not so sure he’s all that good at diplomatic relations or wartime strategies or, you know, governing. Like an orangutan, he’s just a lot of fun to watch.

On the whole, college students aren’t that interested in Donald Trump. However, they can totally get behind a college student who was slapped with a DWI, had her car taken away (by dad, not the cops), and decided to deal with those indignities by getting around town in a Barbie Jeep.

Yup, the kind of Barbie Jeep you’d buy your eight-year-old nephew if you were feeling flush with cash and vindictive toward your homophobic sister-in-law. The kind of Barbie Jeep that runs off a 12-volt battery and tops out at 5 mph.

That’s just the kind of Barbie Jeep that Texas State student Tara Monroe drives around San Antonio.

Like Trump, Monroe is pretty reprehensible on the surface. She’s a party-girl college student who got a DWI and doesn’t appear to feel the tiniest bit of remorse. Rather than suck it up and accept her metaphoric hairshirt and deal with the fact that she could’ve killed herself or others while driving around drunk, she’s lazily put-putting across town in a toy car, like she’s in denial. Without a trace of irony, she told the press that she didn’t use the bike her father gave her because “Riding a bike around campus sucks. Like really sucks.”

But her peers don’t see it that way. They don’t care that she’s unwilling to pay her dues. They don’t care that her vocabulary is limited. They’re completely love with her spunk and her “Eff-you, dad!” attitude.

Then again, at least her car is eco-friendly. And she hasn’t labelled an entire country a bunch of rapists. So maybe she’s the lesser evil.