I blew up a Toastmasters group last night

The BBQ Pit
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Shit, sorry. I was and it was uneventful. The crowd was much larger (50 or so) and the five guys were already seated with others around them. They could have approached me after the meeting, Lord knows I hung around and chatted up the women long enough, but they elected not to.

I also began my 60 seconds with “Some of you here know me well enough to know that the last thing I do is run with the herd, that I have confidence enough in my judgement to say when people and ideas are wrong…” looking at Greg and Vic the whole time. Vic actually turns to Rick and nods.

“… that’s why Franchise Skeptics is a different kind of business analysis firm…” I continue, closing the only reference to prior encounters made that day.

Will be going back this Friday, will try to arrive earlier. :smiley:

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Have no idea where to put this in my list of currently-active threads, so gonna drop it here…

Had a lunch with a Trump supporter yesterday. Guy was looking for advice on how to grow his business, was appreciative of my time and words, etc.

Talk turns to politics. He is a Trump supporter, but not a TRUMP SUPPORTER, if you know what I mean. I told him, frankly, that I was raised with the rule that one doesn’t talk politics, sex, or religion during work.

He agreed, then mentioned that he wished there was one thing that Dems and Reps could agree on… and, well, I couldn’t help myself:

*Since you insist, I am voting for Kamala. And I do think I can make an argument that both sides can agree on"… he chuckled and nodded for me to continue…

“Look, just watch the man. Trump is old. He is legitimately in a mental place that neither of us want to be, Tino. The Dems got rid of their senile old white guy problem, but the Republicans? Well, they could not. And we both know…” I’m leaning in on this point… "that Trump, love him or hate him, cannot finish four years in the White House. It will just kill him. And, so my argument which should get both sides to agree is this:

“If you hate Donald Trump, but even more, if you love the man, truly love him as Jesus says, you should not condemn him to another four years in the White House by voting for him. I’m not saying to vote for Kamala… just don’t vote for Trump. Don’t do that to him. Not if you want him to live, that is.”

He laughingly responded with “Now I have to worry if my vote will kill the man. Thanks!”

“No problem, after all, if you don’t vote for him, he’s still gonna win Texas. But why carry that sin yourself?”

Anyway, he will probably vote for Trump in the end. But he may convince himself not to. Regardless, he assented that was a good argument on which both sides could agree, lol.

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Right, like he’s more likely to survive in prison. :wink:

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I hope your argument will sway the person it was delivered to, but I don’t agree with it. The presidency takes a toll on the men (so far) who have held the office, because they care how the decisions they make in office will affect people. It’s the most powerful job in the world, and the most stressful. The fate of 300+ million citizens rest, in part, on you. That would take a toll on anyone, but only if they care.

I’ve seen no indication that Trump cares. He finished his first term in office as fresh as the day he came down the gold-plated escalator. Four more years of privilege and adulation will rejuvinate him. He needs attention the way the rest of us need oxygen. Losing will kill him faster than winning will.

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I agree. I think his legal travails have taken a toll, but the presidency? It was an annoyance at its worst.

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The ghost of Fred Trump saying “you are not serious people!”

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That’s a distinction without a difference. His legal travails are the result of his presidency.

If he wasn’t running for POTUS he would have never had to bribe Stormy Daniels. There would have been no January 6. There would have been no calls to Georgia to threaten them to fix the election. There would have been no classified document access to abuse.

I bet even his business would have stayed under the radar and not been dismantled in New York. The only thing that I predict would still have happened is that he might have still faced the E Jean Carroll lawsuit, since that was reportedly motivated by the MeToo movement and supposedly had nothing to do with him being POTUS.

While his time in office didn’t affect him for the same reasons as it has other men who held the job, it definitely had a detrimental effect on him.

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Um, and that contradicts me how, exactly? He largely ignored the demands of the office, and his in-office, extracurricular criming led to some serious “fuck around and find out” consequences. Those are not in conflict.

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Heh. Remembering the scene in Amadeus where Salieri disguises himself as Mozart’s dad and commissions the Requiem. Really threw Wolfgang for a loop. Someone should disguise himself as ol’ Fred and show up wherever the America-hating fuckstick goes, always with a scowl of disapproval. It could have an effect.

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Because if he wasn’t POTUS he wouldn’t have endured what he did. It was literally the presidency that has taken its toll.

This is like someone who climbed a mountain then fell off a cliff when trying to take a selfie, and then someone else suggests that climbing the mountain had nothing to do with their death. If they hadn’t climbed up there then there wouldn’t have been anything to fall off of.

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The point was not that the presidency wasn’t part of the dominoes that led to his travails. It was that the stress of the office seems to have been lost on him. And it was. He spent most of his days rage tweeting and watching television, longtime hobbies of his.

When he wasn’t in the White House, he was at Mar-a-Lago holding court or leading a rally or golfing. Occasionally he was unable to avoid a presidential duty (e.g., attending a boring-ass summit), but they were sources of annoyance, not stress.

Not sure why this point triggered your reaction. No one would deny that had he had never been president, he’d not be facing criminal charges for acts committed as president. Yeah, things would be different if they were different. But through it all, the tremendous weight of his duties was, to him, inconsequential. Maybe going to jail? Now that got his attention.

This seems like a silly non-debate.

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Yeah, I don’t really understand the reaction either. This thread isn’t about talking to Trump-haters, it’s about addressing Trump-supporters, the sort of people who do believe that Trump is working tirelessly, getting neither income nor sleep, in his Glorious Efforts to Make America Great Again.

Arguing against that framework is what we do here. But when you’re discussing this sort of stuff with people who believe it, it is more useful to use their own framework to lead them into arguments which they aren’t naturally led.

Like the other day, I was at some Chamber of Commerce thing and some guy comes up to me (and I know he’s a big Trumper) and the group of people I’m with, and just blurts out that he’s in favor of term limits…

“Really, there ought to be term limits!”
“Oh? How many terms do you think, say, a Senator should have?”
“Two terms. No more than two.”
“Bennie, the nice thing about term limits is that we can enact them ourselves. Are you going to put your beliefs in action and NOT vote for Ted Cruz?”
“… well, I’m definitely not voting for Kamala.”
“She isn’t under discussion. Term limits are, it’s your topic. And you said two terms is enough for a Senator, does that mean you aren’t voting for Ted Cruz this year?”
He walked away

Now this moron is going to vote Ted Cruz, no ifs, ands, or buts. But exposing his hypocrisy to both his face and to the onlookers to the point where he had to physically withdraw was a more satisfying argument… and victory… than just getting on an anti-Ted Cruz soapbox and saying shit they’ve been programmed to ignore.

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He wants a law since he can’t stop himself from voting for Ted Cruz. It’s sad, really, the poor Cruz-aholic

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The time to not vote for Cruz was in the primary. He’s going to vote for whatever Republican is in the general election

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If he’d had the wit to respond properly, he might have said,
“well, that’s not the law as it is now. If we had term limits, then I’d have a different republican to vote for in the general. We need to change the law, but until then, I’m certainly not voting democrat.”

Now, what if the democrat opponent has endorsed term limits?

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I suspected as much. He could have answered that he had voted against Cruz in the primary, if he had, rather than leaving

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There’s a rational argument for voting for an incumbent in the primary even if you’re in favor of term limits.

In fact, one of the reasons people are in favor of term limits is that the incumbent advantage is so real and powerful that even bad incumbents don’t get voted out. So why vote out Cruz in the primary only to put an unknown up against a Democratic challenger, and lose Ted Cruz’s real advantage? Especially if Democrats in other states aren’t going to play by these made up rules and keep their incumbents in election after election.

You can not like the rules and still play by them. I don’t like the 2 party system but I’m not about to vote 3rd party on principal.

As for the argument made that voting for Trump is just being mean to an old man who just wants to rest, I find it unpersuasive. If I knew that Kamala would go to an early grave because of the stress of the presidency, I’d vote for her in a heartbeat and then shed a tear at her funeral. Thank you for your service, Madam President.

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Agree. That’s a reasonable argument, but not the one the guy made, suggesting that he hadn’t thought deeply about the issue at all

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So one has to make a choice. Are they in favor of term limits and willing to give up the incumbent advantage for their district/state, or does having that advantage outweigh their stated preference for term limits?

Of course, knowing how Republicans think, it’s likely term limits for Democrats only, not Republicans.

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B-but, but it’s a sin to cast a vote for a Republican!

The limit on terms for Republicans should be ZERO.