Doesn’t this run into the same-state problem?
Yeah, but how hard would it be for Trump to change his residence back to New York (for as long as he has a place to live there)? Might be more effort than he wants to put in for a theoretical VP, though.
I think the one thing we can all agree on is that Rubio changing would be funnier.
What’s interesting is how they craft whatever information they can find to reinforce whatever preconceived narrative they’ve concocted.
Another anecdote - same group was discussing some old neighbors who passed away with large amounts of cash or other valuables squirreled away in soup cans and mattresses and whatnot. They had all these rationales like "growing up during the Great Depression and not trusting banks and how inflation is so high.
The Great Depression was a hundred years ago! They aren’t THAT old. And why is an FDIC insured bank less trustworthy than having the whole town know you hide money away? And why do you think is happening to the purchasing power of that hidden cash thanks to the inflation you just mentioned?
And what prompted this entire discussion was talk about finding valuables and wads of cash down stuck in items down at the thrift store because people either sold the item not remembering they were using it as a hiding place or they died and no one thought to look for an old bag of Krugerrand in a box of old suits.
I don’t think this phenomenon is limited to old people living out in the country. I have a few friends in the city who are Trump supporters and have a similar thinking. We’ve worked together at some point in the past, so one commonality is we make a higher than average income and are work is very integrated into the workings of the global financial / technology / legal apparatus. Some of them are in their 40s or older with no wife and kids. They’re also into a lot of weird cyber-bro shit too.
At the very least, they don’t have to really consider interests outside of their own (and perhaps their clients/ employers who pay them) and Democrat talking points on socioeconomic fairness, wealth equality, the environment, and civic-minded leadership don’t really resonate.
It maybe be a different sort of thinking, but I feel like they are still doing the same sort of mental gymnastics to shoehorn Trump into their narrative that through their wit and clever efforts they somehow managed to get a leg up over the vast majority of people who just want a handout for doing nothing.
There’s an article in this month’s Harper’s Magazine about the overlap between 1960s-70-80s hippie woo/spiritual seeking (Ram Dass, Shirley MacLaine, etc.) and 21st-century MAGA Trumpism. This overlap is embodied in Jacob Angeli-Chansley, the January 6 “Q Anon Shaman,” who served over two years in prison. (The author traces these threads to Carl Jung).
If you haven’t used up your two free articles this month, here you go:
On the original question of “how” I think we have to give most of the credit to Foxnews. Sure you need the MAGA politician content, but by their story line the illegals have become the main thing to fear now. And even with the fine and Tucker Carlson (who can’t be VP by the way…because…nobody will vote for a Tucker) kicked out, Foxnews plows on.
I just watched one of their commentators, Jeanine Pirro, let the mask fall completely.
She said immigrants were destroying New York City . . . let that sink in, immigrants and NYC!
If there’s one place on the planet that has never not been a place where immigrants come to settle it’s NYC.
(Which is really something from a 1st generation American,)
This is (imho) trump’s greatest brain fart. If he claims there’s nothing wrong with him, why doesn’t someone ask him to explain it? I’d like to hear how he would spin it.
I said in another thread, that clip does look really bad, especially with the pause and weird sigh after he muffs up the words. And at first I only saw clips that cut off right after that, making it seem even worse. But extended clips like your clip show that he meant to say ‘be reducing’ and reversed the first two syllables so it came out “re-be-du…sigh.”
Maybe it is a sign that he’s losing it mentally, but in my mind a simple syllable flip is not nearly as bad as many other mental mixups he’s had, such as repeatedly referring to Biden as ‘Obama’ in his speeches, or the recent speech in which he completely mixed up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi-- not merely their names, but what they did (or supposedly did-- his litany of wrongs that he said Haley committed were actually well-worn lies that he had previously claimed Pelosi committed). Then there are the old classics, like saying the Continental army took over the airports during the Revolutionary War.
Then there are the monumentally fucked-up ideas, like using bleach against Covid, or dropping atomic bombs in hurricanes, or ‘raking the forest’ to prevent forest fires, or building a moat full of alligators along the border wall, ect., ect., ad absurdum. Those ideas, I think, are not so much the product of a failing mind, but a mind that is just deeply stupid.
You have to admit that that is a pretty unbalanced way to recover from a verbal gaffe. “Rebidoo…ah!”
Oh, for sure-- the worst part of the gaffe was not the syllable flip itself, but that weird pause and sigh.
I’ve seen other clips where he loses his train of thought altogether and just does a “but anyway…” quickly changing the topic, and I’ve heard it said (on this messageboard and elsewhere) that this is a tactic that those in the early stages of dementia often adopt to disguise the fact that they’re losing it. Maybe that’s what trump was about to do, but recovered his train of thought in that particular case.
As has been said: dementia runs in his family, and that should be repeated. Him setting up Fred with a fake office so he could pretend to run things is classic.
I sort of skimmed through the article. But it seems to me in my inexpert opinion that all these movements tend to consist of people who feel disconnected and distrustful of society at large. There are enough actual conspiracies and self-serving disastrous shit that goes on behind the scenes that we do find out about when it comes to light that it makes a lot of people wonder might be going on that we don’t know about. And a lot of these people are constantly on psychedelics and other drugs, so their view of reality is a bit warped from that as well.
Repeatedly referring to Biden as Obama sounds more like strategy than error: if you’re courting racists, you’ll want remind them that the other white guy thinks black Americans are qualified to be president.
It could also be that DJT is losing it, and revealing the inner workings of his own mind. Guilt by association seems like a thing he’d do a lot.
Yeah, and I’m sure he was employing a similar sophisticated strategy when he confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi multiple times.
Mayyybe…? But no way was there was any strategy when he confused Haley with Pelosi. His excuse that he was being sarcastic when he did so is laughable.
ETA: Nicely Ninja’d by Stratocaster!
ETA II: And, happy anniversary!
I’m making “Al Capone For President” my slogan for 2024.
I don’t know. Women he dislikes are probably interchangeable to him. I don’t think he cares very much about such distinctions between people who aren’t him.
But I’m happy to accept cognitive decline, too, because I’ll take anything that removes him from the stage.
I’m as forgiving of mental gaffes as anybody, even trump’s (see my partial defense of the “re-be-du…sigh” gaffe upthread), but the Haley-Pelosi mixup sure seemed like some neurons frying to me.
Yep. I had one guy at the pub who was loudly “explaining” to his friend how “You can’t have an economy without debt! It’s impossible!”
Now, I’m pretty sure I know exactly how he came to that conclusion. During the 2008-2009 debt crisis, a lot of people were explaining how being able to carry debt makes the economy run more efficiently, and the limits on issuing new debts was causing a general slow-down of the economy over all. So, there’s a seed of truth there, but to leap from that to “you can’t have an economy at all” without debt is…well, quite a leap.
But this guy was convinced he was right, and that knowing this made him smarter than everyone else in the pub.