I think this is your core mistake: America is not a first-world democracy; those places have universal health care, gun control and they don’t have our development indicators. We’re exactly the kind of place that embraces fascism.
I wish it were that simple, but look at the UK with Brexit and its recent race riots. I think just about any country is prone to this kind of thing with the right stoking.
Also, so far, none of the lies seem to be sticking. One part of the Big Lie technique is repeating the lies often enough that they just become assumed truth. But we don’t seem to be seeing that.
What is the Harris equivalent of “Buttery Males!”? If one or two Big Lies don’t stick soon, they’ll just run out of time.
I asked a few weeks ago, “How will they demonize Harris?”, and so far, despite many attempts, they haven’t found anything that seems to be working.
I’ve said it before, but Trump is offering the same deal to MAGAs that Hitler offered to his own supporters: I’ll turn everything upside down, and you get to be on my side and do it with me. Other people that you don’t like will get hurt, but you won’t. Others will lose; you will win.
For Hitler, it was the “real Germans” who would win. The Jews, commies, and liberals would lose.
For Trump, it is the straight, white, self-branded “Christians”* who would win. That’s the real sense in which they want a “white Christian-nationalist theocracy.” They don’t give a fuck about the theory of the thing, and there will actually be a lot of stuff about it that they don’t like (as many Germans learned to their regret in the 1930s). But they get to be the “winners.”
*Not actual followers of Jesus and practitioners of love of neighbor.
Yeah, it’s surprising how much they are failing. Although the swiftboating of Walz doesn’t seem to be succeeding, at least it’s a bludgeon that they can focus on. They don’t seem to have developed anything of the sort for Harris.
I just think Americans will keep telling themselves that everywhere has problems while we circle the drain. It reminds me a lot of the late Soviet Union when people who spent their whole lives being told they were citizens of the greatest nation in history had it all come crumbling down.
I think that’s hyperbole. It’s more accurate to say that America is a first-world democracy that is deeply flawed, with a deep undercurrent of ignorance, and overall is less democratic and more plutocratic than any other first-world democracy.
Not to sidetrack, but I’ll illustrate this with the health care example you mentioned. There is absolutely no rational basis for saying “I prefer a health care system that costs me much more than it would anywhere else, that often offers less service or worse results, and that places huge bureaucratic obstacles between me and access to health care”. Absolutely none. This is not an ideology, it’s insanity.
Yet Trump successfully ran on a promise to abolish the Affordable Care Act, failed to do so, and is running on the same promise again. And the ACA is not even remotely close to universal health care – it’s just a sliver of assistance to those abandoned by the mainstream health insurance paradigm, and after some grumbling was approved by Republicans (and indeed has similarities to a plan that Nixon had proposed decades ago), yet Trumpists want to burn it to the ground. That’s not ideology, it’s insanity. Trumpists are either profoundly ignorant or outright insane – it has to be one or the other. That’s why more and more Republicans are breaking away from Trumpism, some no doubt out of fear for their country, others probably out of sheer embarrassment.
Do you think his unhinged late-night rants on Truth Social, full of misspellings, random capitalizations, or all-caps rantings, are also just catering to an audience? Is it not just easier to believe that this a moron catering to morons, who incidentally he despises because he fancies himself a wealthy “elite” and they’re just “basement dwellers” – but he needs their votes?
What I will grant you is that he does possess an animal cunning, able to read his audience and give them the bullshit that they want. This is not intelligence, this is the cunning of a snake-oil salesman.
I’ll see your slightly above average intelligence and raise you a “Person. Man. Woman. Camera. TV.” Donald Trump thought it was impressive to have memorized those five words.
Now you might say, “Oh he was just lying. He didn’t actually have to memorize those words.” In which case, he thought that people would find memorizing those five words impressive so he thought it was, in fact, an impressive feat. How can somebody with slightly above average intelligence manage to not think of better lies? And this is of course just one of his numerous obvious and badly constructed lies. I’ve never seen any evidence that Trump is above average in intelligence in any significant way, and lots of evidence that he is not. Perhaps in his youth he was more intelligent but the man running for president right now is not very bright.
Let’s not forget “injecting bleach” as a cure for COVID, prompting the Clorox company to have to issue warnings on their website, because if a US president says something, it tends to be believed.
Exactly. The number of examples are too numerous to list. That’s what I mean when I say lots of evidence that he’s not very bright. I don’t think The Librarian is a Trumpist or anything, but I’ve never seen anybody Trump supporter or otherwise make a compelling case for him being bright except he’s rich. Which is just the societal problem of seeing wealth as a scorecard for ability/worth/value/skill/talent/etc., and we all know that’s not true.
The USSR had real structural problems and a shaky state capitalist economy. Plus, its people hated it.
If the US fails now, it will 100% be owing to social failures (as was the case before and during the Civil War).
Yes, have a lot of problems, but no country really has it solved at this point (i.e., we are not massively behind best practices in any given category and do better in some areas than most countries).
Are you reading and hearing what he actually says, the way he says it, or you reading translations by others trying to make him look good?
Well, it is possibly more gratifying to think a Machiavellian schemer has come out on top rather than a bumbler. The line of thinking that begins “surely, he can’t…” starts out with poor assumptions.
People (especially on this board) seem to be under the impression that intelligence or ability is necessary to have an outsized impact on society. This does not necessarily follow.
Trump can absolutely still win and does lead a movement that can and will have repercussions that will last for decades. While there do have to be people on his staff to do the grunt work of organizing and PR and so on, it does not necessitate any real personal intelligence or capability on his part personally. Those are certainly correlated with success but the correlation is not 100%. Not even close.
Two words: Pet Rocks
A direct link to him not being stupid, please.
He has said and done the things that have resulted in him becoming a media star, a president, and keeping support despite doing horrible things. He knows what to say and how to say it to reach a large fraction of the public. That is undeniably to me a form of not stupid.
In defense of @The_Librarian, I will say that Trump did graduate from Wharton.
Yes, there is controversy about that. His actual academic performance there is a secret, and people who knew him in the school said he had little interest in academics and he was doing badly.
But he did graduate. He might have had help from a wealthy family “greasing the wheels” so to speak, but if he was a complete imbecile I don’t think he would have managed.
I don’t think he’s much above average intelligence based on decisions he has made and the way he communicates, but I don’t think that, in general, he’s an idiot.
And I do think that he does intentionally “talk down” in speeches a bit to make himself more appealing to the “basement dwellers” that support him (supposedly his own words for MAGA people behind closed doors).
In addition, I don’t think he’s particularly book smart but he has a kind of cunning that has brought him exceptional success in some areas (such as becoming famous and eventually becoming the most powerful man in the world for a while).
If what you’re suggesting is that Trump is a dumbass with an inexplicable outside influence, then I fully agree. There are conflicting theories about the explanation for that influence. Mine is that about 40% of his supporters are as stupid as he is, 40% are just intransigent Republicans who would vote for an orangutan if it had an (R) after its name (and may or not may not also be as stupid as he is, but many are just selfish assholes with vested interests in Republican economic policy) and the remaining 20% are fascists. Just a guess at the proportions.
Did you miss my comment about “animal cunning, like a snake-oil salesman”?
I’d like to preface my thoughts on Trump’s intelligence with a very short story. I dated someone for about a year a long time ago who was a PhD student. She said she had a 160 IQ, which seemed believable enough to me.
But her knowledge of basic shit was… total shit. I asked her a bunch of questions one night to check things out. One sticks in my mind: “What’s the third planet from the sun?”
She said, “I don’t know, Jupiter?” 
So was she smart or was she dumb? A little bit of both, I think! And so is Donald Trump:
- I think his IQ is clearly north of 100.
- If you watch videos of him in his 40s and 50s, he was much more eloquent and intelligent-seeming. Even in 2016 he was a lot better than he is now. The younger Trump also seems less purely malevolent (though of course there was the whole Central Park Five thing, showing his penchant for evil).
- wolfpup mentioned his “animal cunning.” That’s a form of smarts in its own right. The man is a natural-born demagogue, confidence man, and self-promoter, and he has real charisma (not the kind that appeals to me but to ignorant people). He flirted with running for president earlier in life, and I’m surprised he didn’t succeed. Perhaps he really needed to become more evil in order to channel the dark psyche of America.
- Rex Tillerson called Trump a “fucking idiot”–and that’s also true! I think in terms of epistemology, the ability to assess truth and create a map of reality, Trump is a straight F student. He has neither the perceptiveness nor patience to understand what POTUS must understand. Further, everything must pass through Trump’s narcissism filter, becoming massively distorted in the process.
- To the extent that Trump has succeeded, it’s been through the aforementioned animal cunning and demagogue’s charisma as well as hothousing by his father and Roy Cohn and other such mentors in certain areas, e.g., real estate, cons, grifts, weaponization of the legal system, etc. But he has failed a lot too, and that’s because he is not able to back up his grifts with other forms of intelligence, and of course he has no morals or personal integrity.
Trump is failing right now. And yeah, he seems demented and stupid as fuck because he is. Only the dedication of his cult and right-wing propaganda outlets can save him.
None of this is a direct link to him saying something not stupid today.