I think you’re missing a word in there: “believe”. They have to believe their enemies hate what he says because, in reality, we’re too busy trying to figure out what the fuck he’s on about to hate anything.
I sit corrected.
Then this headline will appear over and over:
Trump says he wants to debate Biden
Except, the headlines would be more on the lines of — Trump again calls Biden a coward for dodging debate.
Some Democrats question whether Biden should agree to debate Trump. But:
This isn’t 1964, when debating was still new, and LBJ could sit on a big lead. As Carville implies, polling, for a modern candidate, seen to avoid debate, will be brutal and dispositive. Even though I think it is too late for Biden to drop out, if he won’t tangle with Trump one on one, he should drop out immediately.
P.S. However, Biden should not agree to debate outside the normal Commission on Presidential Debates format. Trump gave in on that last time and will do so again.
The first statement really has very little to do with the second statement. We may not be able to properly diagnose either from afar, but based on Trump’s rapidly increasing frequency of nonsensical statements, saying it is unlikely sounds more like wishful speculation.
Has the Commission on Presidential Debates fixed the rules so that Trump will stay still while Biden tries to answer the question? Will they have the guts to cut microphones when (not if) things get out of hand? Will they finally realize that Trump doesn’t give a rat’s ass about why they have him up on stage?
Biden would destroy Trump in a debate, given Trump’s cognitive decline. Joe will come off fine, just as he has in every speech, presser, interview, etc., that I’ve seen (most of ‘em). In a lengthy debate, Trump’s dementia will manifest itself multiple obvious times, multiple obvious ways. Like really bizarre stuff, not just word salad.
If I were on Trump’s team (shudder!), I’d do everything possible to keep him off that stage.
I love this quote:
This is beyond narcissism. I used to think Trump was an 11-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully. I was off by about 10 years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value - indeed exists - only insofar as it sustains and inflates him."*
.
Most politicians seek approval. But Trump lives for the adoration. He doesn’t even try to hide it, boasting incessantly about his crowds, his standing ovations, his TV ratings, his poll numbers, his primary victories. The latter are most prized because they offer empirical evidence of how loved and admired he is.
–Conservative columnist and trained psychiatrist, Charles Krauthammer (deceased)
And, yes: Trump has some sort of bizarre but finely-tuned feedback loop that tells him how he’s doing in front of a crowd of his sycophants and causes him to course correct, rhetorically.
In that regard, he’s like an extremely early, extremely buggy, extremely dangerous version of ChatGPT.
Come to think of it … he’s like that in just about every regard.
Supposing ability to diagnose dementia without neurological examination: One characteristic is symptom variability. Good days and bad days. So how Donald would perform, if suffering from dementia, is uncertain.
I’m guessing this is a rhetorical question, and that if a pollster asks you whether they need to debate, you’ll say no.
If enough of those polled realize the inanity of debating Donald Trump, Biden can bow out. But what with the Trumpers sure that their guy can knock out Biden, and the Democrats sure Joe will come out on top, and the swing voters who refuse to accept that this is not a normal match-up, I think you will be out-voted.
I myself say Biden needs to debate, or brawl, or whatever we want to call it, because, otherwise, Trump’s charges of cowardice will work.
Stress is a significant factor in the expression of dementia symptoms. Trump on the debate stage would be a shit show, and not the type we’ve grown accustomed to.
You’re giving the process and the voters way too much credit. As long as Biden gets a name or a year wrong at least once and Trump gets in one halfway decent zinger (both very likely) it’ll be a wash at best, even if DJT babbles incoherently the rest of the time (also likely).
If substance mattered even a little bit we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.
It doesn’t have to be diagnosed to hurt his re-election chances, Many people have already pointed out the thing he often does during his screeds speeches where he gets stuck on a word he can’t pronounce, or loses his train of thought, and immediately changes the subject. Which is a coping mechanism that people in the early stages of dementia adopt. If that is the case with trump, he’ll presumably progress to the point where he’s not even able to switch topics when he loses his train of thought, and start having McConnell-style blank-outs.
trump’s supporters don’t seem to mind whatever sheer idiocy comes out of his mouth, as long as he is constantly ranting. But if he starts blanking out, that will not go well with his followers, I would think. Let’s hope if that is what’s going to happen it starts before the election, not after.
That’s a fair point. I should have more clearly worded it as, “To any sane viewer who can maintain a reasonable state of objectivity, Biden would demolish Trump.”
I do believe, however, that at least a few Trump-leaning voters would be taken aback by his decline. How many? Enough to make a difference? No idea.
I think it’s possible that there won’t be a debate, but it won’t be because Biden refuses it.
As others have said, there are already debates scheduled, run by the organization that has run debates for decades now. Biden will say he’s prepared to debate Trump at any time, under the rules as established by the committee. It’s Trump who will refuse those conditions, if anyone. Trump hates rules when they’re applied to him, and he’ll push back on the debate structure, and demand ridiculous concessions. All Biden has to say is, “I’ve already agreed to the rules as laid out by the non-partisan debate committee, so we’ll have a debate whenever Trump is finally ready to face me.” The more Trump pushes back the more it feeds into the “Trump thinks he’s above the law” narrative.
If I had to bet, we’ll have one awful debate just like last time.
There are three big differences between narcissism and sociopathy. One of them is hostility, which Trump has in spades.
But, oddly, Trump does not feel stressed when he is on stage.
A normal person gets stage fright, is worried about how they appear, whether they made mistakes, etc. But Trump only cares that he gets applause. He simply doesn’t care if what is says is logical, consistent etc.
Two days ago he said this nonsense :" We have languages coming in to our country, nobody that speaks those languages. They’re truly foreign languages. Nobody speaks them."
Trump simply doesn’t care. So he’ll say anything, and not care. After a few dozen of such stupid gaffes, he’ll just declare that he won the debate, and believe it.
Biden will make 2 or 3 minor gaffes, and the whole world will say he’s a poor debater, and not qualified to be president.
Not at a MAGA rally in front of his adoring peeps, no. I think a debate stage where he knows he’ll be judged by lots of folks in and out the media, including those who don’t think him the Second Coming, turns up the heat.
I agree trump is a dangerous and increasingly demented idiot. But …
That’s not nonsense. You just didn’t understand what he meant because you took it very literally, or as if it was a carefully crafted piece of quality unambiguous writing.
IMO it’s obvious what he meant. His followers understood it. It’s the kind of verbal shorthand very common among the stupid who are used to dealing with only like-minded people. Lots of shared context is assumed and much of what’s meant doesn’t need to be said.
IMO here’s what it means:
We have languages coming in to our country, nobody that is already here and is a desirable Real American speaks those languages. They’re truly foreign un-American languages versus the familiar languages already in the USA that we (grudgingly) accept alongside English, the only language of Real True Americans. Nobody we want to be here speaks them.
Within the context of the anti-immigrant crowd, all that inserted part doesn’t need to be said. They all implicitly understand the judgmental parts that don’t need to be said. The very word “foreign” is indelibly freighted with “inferior” and “undesirable”.
Like when you read the word “regulation”, they understand “job-killing regulation”. When you read the word “foreign” they understand “inferior undesirable foreign”.
Yep. We have a past debate as evidence of this. Apart from the things you mention was the vast amount of cross-talk that made the whole thing unwatchable.
Agreed. A more benign example was when he recently talked about faucets where “no water comes out”. Lawrence O Donnell on MSNBC did at least two segments on this one gaffe, interpreting it as meaning, I guess, a tap that was just a solid plug.
As I’ve said before: Trump is stupid in popular ways.
The average guy on the street may well say there was “no water” in some contexts to mean “insufficient flow of water”.
We can all make fun of these errors (as I did, actually, with the “languages” thing) but it’s worth being aware that to many Americans, not only do these not sound like errors, they’re endearing. To them, he’s not a politician, he’s one of them.
If any of this sounds like praise of Trump, hell no. But it helps to be aware of why he’s as popular as he is (as well as the bigotry).
I disagree with this statement. Whatever the morality of it* is not impossible to identify dementia (which unlike senility is a collection of symptoms without any presumption of underlying causes). That’s like saying it’s impossible to say someone died based on publicly available information. Yes to formally declare someone dead requires a doctor examining a body and finding no signs of life. But that doesn’t mean I am incapable of saying the Russian soldier who just clearly got a switchblade drone in the face on a hi-res Twitter video is in fact dead.
* - that link makes some good points in that respect, though I know for a fact the numerous people I know personally who are dealing with dementia are not going to be offended by me pointing out the obvious dementia symptoms in the jackass attempting to regain control of the United states nuclear arsenal.
I think you’re overplaying this thought. Sure, people often get stage fright to start with. But once you’ve been making public appearances, speeches, etc. for a lengthy period, those feelings are greatly diminished. (Speaking from personal experience as a barrister.)
Trump’s been doing public speeches and appearances for much of his adult life. He’s a seasoned pro at it, just like Biden.