I saw he was spinning himself as the winner during rallies immediately afterward, but I assumed that was just for the rubes. You mean he actually believes it??!? :eek:
Check 538’s Now Cast, it’s swung considerably towards Clinton and I believe it will keep swinging to her for another week while more post debate poll results roll in (scientific poll’s not bullshit online ones). So Yeah he lost, scientifically 
So how much will these Cuba accusations affect Trump in Florida?
Oops, wrong place for the above. Gonna ask it in a better thread.
Trump’s being a Republican again.
We had “unskewed” polls back in 2012, based on the assumption that every pollster was biased in favor of Obama and colluding to hide the reality that Romney was going to win the election. This actually gained traction in the Republican world. It fed into the pre-existing “Liberal Media” talking point, which has been so ingrained for so long that it’s difficult for some people to notice that the mainstream media leans center-right out of a desire to not appear partisan. In the political world, it takes two to lie: One to lie, and one to not call them on their lie, thereby becoming complicit in it.
In fact, I’ll expand on that point: Treating fake controversy as if it were real legitimizes the side which doesn’t have a valid argument. We’ve seen this in the global warming “debate”: One side has massive amounts of science on its side, the other has innuendo and nothing. Treating them as equivalently valid is a massive gift to the side that’s just blowing smoke.
But that subtle complicity isn’t enough. You’re with us or against us. That’s Trump’s message to his surrogates: Anything less than full-throated support, even in the face of simple reality, is treason.
This, too, is right out of the Republican hymnbook; it’s what keeps a whole industry of right-wing media flourishing, a massive empire which owns AM talk radio and has its tendrils in everything else and is founded on the idea that Republicans should never hear anything which offends them. The book-publishing portion of it has even created a whole alternate history, a politically correct history where all of the Founding Fathers were Evangelical Christians and where the Confederates seceded for some nebulous ideals of “States’ Rights” and honest, hard-working self-determination. It’s horrible scholarship, founded as it is on factual inaccuracies and gross distortions, but the fact the academics reject it ties into the “Liberal Academia” concept, which is so useful when you need to get people to accept that practically every competent climate scientist is wrong about something.
Trump’s behavior is nothing new. It’s louder and more garish, but it’s a variation on the same pathology. He’s the Tea Party in a comb-over, a gilded version of the kind of party which could rebuke the “reality-based community” with a straight face. And there’s every indication he believes what he’s selling.
It’s going to be fun watching him run headlong into reality.
She can do the Shimmy. Even better.
Trump looked exhausted in the last third of Debate 1. Having to move around isn’t going to help him a lot.
Yes, at the beginning Trump seemed well-rehearsed. By the end he was babbling like Sarah Palin.
Toward the end he mentioned “stamina.” I wish Hillary had come back with “Stamina? Shall we ask the network if we can continue this debate for another half-hour, Donald?”
No, there’s not going to be anything fun about it. Even if he loses the election, he will have succeeded in making our country, our society, our culture worse in a way that might be difficult to correct.
Trump has emboldened people to be vicious racists and misogynists and to threaten violence against those who dare to publicly disagree with them. We don’t yet know how this will play out in the long run, but it’s not going to be fun.
Maybe Trump will demand a ‘restroom break’ every 30 minutes so he can coke up again.
Or just a shorter time period, at which point the talking point is “Donald Trump doesn’t have the stamina to debate for 90 minutes”.
I do think it is funny as hell that he’s angry at people for admitting that he lost, when he won’t.
As I said, Trump isn’t doing anything that the GOP hasn’t already been doing for decades. He’s just doing it so badly that people notice.
There’s a pattern to these things: Attitudes begin as a nebulous fog, pervasive and influential but impossible to fight. You attack one specific instance, and people think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill, because the pervading attitude is invisible unless you’re on the wrong side of it. It’s shadow-boxing, and it’s just as demoralizing as trying to punch smoke.
Then something happens to help crystallize a movement. That coherent group is threatening, because it’s large and its activities are focused, so the establishment has to form a coherent movement to fight it.
That’s the beginning of the end. That polarization, where you can no longer ignore it or pretend it’s just a few nutballs, defines the fight, and, typically, the establishment has really terrible arguments. Why would it have good ones? It’s never needed them. It’s always been able to shout down and ignore everyone else. Seeing it try to make its point is like seeing a naked person trying to explain why they’re in the middle of the street wearing nothing but a pained expression: They have a really good reason, just hold on, just wait a moment, and it will come to them…
Trump is at the core of a counter-movement, the movement formed of the establishment, formed in response to other movements such as, yes, BLM, and the trans movement, and the gay movement, and the nascent Left Populist movement that formed around Sanders this cycle. And, as we’ve seen, his movement has no rhetorical clothing. (The brain bleach is over there.)
Trump’s most important flaws, his racism, his misogyny, his financial and legal sliminess, his utter denial of reality, are all shared by the GOP as a whole. However, they’ve been so diffuse, and the worst perpetrators just genteel enough, that accusing them of those flaws has made you look like a bit of a partisan hack. Trump brings them all out into the open, in full color and wearing a bad suit. His actions give the media permission to talk about them.
So, yes, Trump does provide a rallying point. That’s a good thing: The enemy’s easier to hit when it’s all bunched up and moving in the same direction. I’m sure MacArthur wouldn’t have appreciated his men being one mortar strike away from total annihilation.
Except that once he’s gone, they’ll all claim that they themselves were always uncomfortable with the racism, sexism, etcetera, so don’t blame them and make them part of that failure!
Then in four years we’ll get someone who just does a slightly better job of shadowing those things.
I agree with your whole post, but particularly this. Trump is the distilled essence of what the GOP has become.
What the GOP has become is a party of the mostly harmless terrified of the batshit Clown Posse in their midst. Can’t win without them. They’ve gerrymandered themselves into a corner. They set things up so that they had a thin but real advantage. That, along with some deftly applied voter suppression, and they figured to win most if not all of the close ones.
But that doesn’t work if the nutbars aren’t on board. If a candidate has pretty much all of the more-or-less sane Republicans, but loses half of the shriekers, he/she is El Tostado, the one who is toast.
For verily, it is written, that whatsoever shall go around, therefore shall it come around.
If Trump falls, the Professional Right will just bring out, like clockwork, their tried and tired “if we only had run a REAL conservative” lament. And yes, even the Lyin’ Teds and the Rancid Priebuses will just say “look, I never liked him at all but I was being a disciplined party member defending America from the evil horrors of She Who Must Not Be Named.”
This is what strikes fear into my soul. Seeing batshit insane people who believe Trump, who has been proven to lie every 3 1/4 minutes, is acceptable because Clinton has …“honesty issues.” Fact checking this jerk is a full time job for a staff of hundreds.
We need to stay scared. We need to keep ourselves scared, our family scared, our friend scared. If you don’t vote, we’re all gonna DIE!. Gonna be a long forty days, especially if you, like me, are trying to stay sane and sober. OK, pick one! Just vote!
Your Indo-European is *very *sloppy. :dubious:
I think just the opposite. Hillary has done town halls forever, and in fact all through the primaries she was doing small events in which she talked to individuals in the crowd, while Bernie and Donald were doing their huge rallies. Have we ever seen Trump do any retail campaigning? I think it will be very awkward. Trump might even forget where he is, and if a Democratic-leaning questioner asks a question, yell out “Get him out of here!” LOL
This made me laugh far more than it probably ought to.
The batshit ones are just saying the usual Republican talking points a bit louder and with a bit less polish.
Trump’s claim that the Chinese invented global warming to destroy the American economy is not all that different from an Establishment Republican demanding that there’s still enough uncertainty in the science that limiting our carbon emissions would be a bad thing. In both cases, it’s a denial of science and, therefore, a denial of reality, and in both cases, it’s setting us up for even worse consequences.
The difference is that Trump’s version is more obviously insane, which, as I’ve explained above, is mostly a good thing.
Oh there are a few people who just don’t like Clinton, who buy the narrative that she is dishonest or what have you. But I think that misses the bigger motivations:
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The basket that really is deplorable, some of whom are even irredeemable. For them Clinton could be as honest as anyone and it would not matter.
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True “values” conservatives who really don’t “hate” anyone but who do not want a less conservative Court.
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A relatively few who believe that Clinton will cause their taxes to increase. For some of them, well they are right. Highest earners will likely pay more.
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The other basket that Clinton referenced, people who feel the world is leaving them behind in many ways, and not only economically, but in terms of social status as well. Some are resentful and some just believe that the unknown “what’s behind door number two” is their best choice because they are not happy with what they have (which Clinton represents more of). Sure, it may be much more likely to be a goat, but it could be a brand new car!
The last group is the only one that contains significant numbers of individuals who might be swayable. They need to see how great the odds are that choice will be the goat and is certainly not a brand new car, and be convinced that they have now is not so bad, is leading to real progress (for them too), and is very much preferred to blowing the whole thing up.
TL;DNR? It’s not all perceived “honesty issues.”