Candidates travel immense distances and make dozens of speeches while people try to trip them up. I don’t give much weight to the verbal mistakes made by Trump or Biden. The problem is only one of them seemingly gets a free pass.
Remember Trump’s “perfect phone call” with Zelenskyy?
Trump doesn’t.
Not only can he not get out “The Rolling Stones,” but it’s not even one of their songs (it’s by Sam & Dave).
How… convenient.
This seems like a profoundly bad idea to me. Biden stumbles over his words a lot. I will defend them as not being due to cognitive decline, but I do acknowledge they exist.
The only logic I can see is him saying “See, Trump does it, too.” But I think that just pushes the “both of us are too old” narrative that he should avoid.
I’m not saying they can’t be called out, but let others do it, so Biden doesn’t come off like a hypocrite.
I agree that jumping on a president for a verbal slip is not useful. Imagine someone had a camera on you 24/7 and jumped on every verbal slip. No one can survive such scrutiny.
But, I think there is a qualitative difference. Biden stutters, says a dumb thing here and there. Trump is known for his word salad and it is only getting worse. Trump is way beyond getting a fact wrong or saying someone’s name wrong. He is mentally dysfunctional. His train of thought is off the rails. He shows no grasp of the issues. And he does it regularly.
I think that is a difference worth noting. The degree of dysfunction skews hard towards Trump.
Trump says there will be a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses the election
Confused, a considered idle threat, or deadly serious? You decide:
Interpretation 1:
Trump is a confused old man mixing up unrelated concepts: Likely high tariffs on Chinese cars, should they try to export ones made in Mexico (a plant is in early planning stages), and a threat to kill lots of Americans if he loses the election.
Interpretation 2:
Trump correctly believes that in an atmosphere of fear, autocratic populists like himself win, and so tries to create fear. He here is throwing out a confused new line of attack, against Biden, to see what works, but is not confused himself.
Interpretation 3:
Trump wants to get more votes by threatening those who vote against him. But he knows it would backfire if he baldly said that I’ll have Americans killed if you don’t vote for me. He therefore surrounds the threat with a unrelated concept so that the targets feel fear, but feel they cannot blame him for it due to the ambiguity.
I like Interpretation 3, but admit the slightly less diabolical Interpretation 2 is possible.
With either 2 or 3, Trump keeps the attention on himself, lessening the chance of Biden’s messaging breaking through.
To save me googling, was the tape made public as Trump claims in that clip? (I don’t remember that it was.) If so, can you link to a transcript of the call?
MtG says he was talking about the auto industry.
You know, I hate Trump as much as anyone else in this thread, but these tiny clips of little verbal moments just aren’t convincing of anything profound to me. It all seems to be of a piece with the insane rambling word-salad style he’s had for years. Unless something changes drastically, I don’t see any of this moving the needle (sadly).
His firm supporters are supposed to fill in some blanks so that, for some, their takeaway was that if Biden is re-elected, the U.S. auto industry will experience a metaphorical bloodbath of reduced sales due to Chinese/Mexican competition.
But I think he knew that the sound bite takeaway, heard by swing/uncertain voters, would be the ambiguous prediction of a bloodbath if he loses.
Telling a rally in Pennsylvania that Biden defeated Obama strikes me as a bit more than word salad.
But yeah, his demented ravings won’t meaningfully change sentiment in the Trump cult.
It appears that the White House did provide a transcript of the call, on Trump’s orders, since he was certain it was indeed perfect.
Thinking about this again, I’m going to give the devil her due and concede that this is more plausible than what I previously posted
Agreed, and I think (hope) it’s going to get significantly worse in the next few months. I’m praying Trump goes fully off the rails at a major event, with complete insane babble, ending with him being fully aphasic.
Well, Trump isn’t lying. According to the transcript he didn’t say ‘quid pro quo’ nine times. It’s clear what he was asking, but he didn’t use The Words.
It depends…
If he is in court it was confused.
If it is nightly news it is an idle threat.
If it was his base it is a wink and a nudge…know what I mean? 
(i.e. deadly serious) It’s not a dog whistle (different thing) but kinda works like one.
His cult will still vote for him. “He’s in deep thought about making America great again”. Ya know they will.
IMHO, it’s already insane babble. So a little more insanity is no big deal.
Although when Deep Purple scrambled the name, singing “With the Rolling truck Stones thing,” we loved them for it. Of course, it helps to be as cool as Deep Purple, which TFG will never achieve.
A poster in another thread, (apologies I forget who it was or I would give credit here), refer to this as stochastic terrorism. And I think that’s exactly what this is. This is the exact same s*** he was pulling during the run after the 2020 election that let the January 6th.
The problem that interpretations one two and three all share is that Trump supporters are going to hear the same mob boss style “say it without saying it” and the dumbest of them are going to think they’re doing exactly what he wants. Which they will be.
Exactly.
The magic words. Again it’s the mob boss thing. Trump thinks if he doesn’t say the magic words that he can’t get in trouble. His intent doesn’t matter, him knowing precisely how his supporters are going to react also doesn’t matter. It all comes down to magic words.
It kind of reminds me of the whole dust up over the word ‘illegal’ after the State of the Union. Trump supporters want to hang that on Biden like he was being a hypocrite. The history of the speaker, the context the word was used in, who he was speaking to when he used it, none of that matters. Only thing that matters is that he said the same thing that Trump did therefore they’re exactly the same.
Not that it needs to be said once again, but these people are not serious it’s all a semantic game to them. Politics and governance aren’t about making the country, the world, or other americans’ lives better off. It’s all a zero sum game, as long as they have power and can play the victim card they will say or do anything to gain or retain that power. Look no further than the border bill fiasco.