If it’s on Lincoln Project’s main page (which I can see just fine), I can’t figure out which one it is.
He produced actual English words that were at least for the most part in plausible English sentences. The fact that what he was saying in them sometimes made no sense in the context of what’s actually happening is a different type of incoherence. I think what people mean is that he avoided producing a lot of word salad, and quite a few people expected that he would or at least thought that he might.
It might be fun to change up some of the rules. This time, they were not allowed any notes. Let’s set it up so that they can bring “one binder of notes” on stage, and can consult them to make a point.
This won’t help Trump, because we all know he can’t read for shit, and isn’t organized enough to remember where in the binder Fact A or Fact B is.
But Harris? Imagine this: Trump gets frustrated trying to find Fact A for his first question, and goes off on a rant. In rebuttal, Harris pulls out a comically oversized binder clearly labelled “Trump’s usual lies”, and casually flips to a page half way through it, and then clearly rebuts Trump’s rant.
Shares in Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social network, plunged more than 16% on Wednesday morning to a record low. The shares recovered a bit by mid-afternoon, but were still down more than 12%.
I couldn’t find it on their main page either, but I managed to find it on YouTube. Here’s the video of what Harris was thinking in that pause before saying former President. (audio is not safe for work):
Right. And Trump has said so many terrible things. When listing examples, we don’t need to reference anything that comes with an asterisk and further explanation. About 1000 things speak for themselves.
Sure…or just anyone who has not made up their mind which way they’ll vote?
I mean, I know to many of us, which way a person should vote has been very obvious since 2015. But there remain people who, perhaps have been misled on the economy or other issues, and remain somewhat on the fence. That’s largely the point of doing the debate.
I’m on a couple of forums that are more politically balanced than here (and that’s not a criticism of SD…never before has reality had such a left-wing bias than in America now. So forums can either be centrist, or they can be reality-based, but they can’t be both).
And yeah the “who lied more” thing is being used rhetorically on both sides. I’d say the MAGA side has comprehensively lost in the attempt to claim Harris lied more, but still, it would have been nice to not have to admit “ok, the thing about ‘on both sides’ might be considered misleading…”
That’s just it - I don’t think there are that many of them, so catering to some niche group is a mistake.
After a decade of either holding or campaigning for the job, people know who Trump is. This isn’t a case where people are unfamiliar with either candidate.
If they’re still waffling between that and something else at this point, they are professionally “undecided” and won’t be swayed by some pedantic distinction about “very fine people”.
There was a precipitous drop immediately after the debate. Looking at it just now, it hasn’t really recovered – still wobbling around the $16 mark to which it suddenly dropped Wednesday morning immediately post-debate.
People who already are predisposed to distrust the mainstream news. Which is a wide swath of people from all sides. Even I know that much of the news is more about sensationalism and profitability than providing facts.
I would expect that undecided voters are some of the most distrustful of news. They are likely low-information voters, which means they don’t watch it much. And one big reason not to watch the news is that you don’t trust it.
Plus no one is seeing things with their own eyes. It all comes from sources who pick what they want to show. The whole argument is that the media supposedly misleadingly edited the Trump video to make it seem like Trump supported Nazis. And this proves that the news is being deliberately unfair to Trump.
And that is one of Trump’s big campaign talking points. He uses it for a reason. Clearly undecided votes aren’t 100% sure he’s lying about that, or they wouldn’t be undecided.
When fact checking, giving the full truth is important. The problem with the Snopes article isn’t the information they give, but how they frame the claim is “false.” That alone is enough to convince low information voters who may have never seen the clip that they can ignore it.
Why do you think MAGA has still been able to recruit more people even after all Trump has done?
These are the same people that think because butter is $7 a pound that the economy is in the toilet. It’s a wee bit more complex than your personal discomfort with food prices.
I think there’s a large group of people who are undecided about whether they will vote. They may want a certain candidate to win, but come election day, they may not make the effort actually cast a ballot. These voters need external motivation in order to encourage them to make the effort to go to the polls. Harris’ strong debate performance is that kind of motivation. It helps makes people excited to participate in getting her elected. That seems to be the point of campaigning these days. It seems like most everyone has already made up their mind as to who they want to win. Campaigning seems to be about generating excitement in those supporters to motivate them enough to actually cast their vote.
And in contrast, Biden’s poor debate performance greatly reduced that kind of enthusiasm. It made his supporters think he was probably going to lose, so no sense taking an hour or two to stand in line and vote. Biden’s support may not have changed that much after the polls, but he lost the motivation in his supporters to actually take the time to vote.
I said the same thing in the latter part of the same post of mine from which you quoted, so I’d say we’re in agreement on that:
His ‘word salad’ tendencies were relatively constrained during the debate, yes, but I think that’s more a result of the debate structure than any coherence on trump’s part. They got two minutes to answer questions and one minute rebuttals. Which, as you pointed out, was time trump used to mainly hammer away at well-worn talking points, most of which had little or nothing to do with the actual question asked. In that sense his debate performance was not much different than the much ridiculed clip in which, at a recent economic forum, trump was asked what he’d do to ease the cost of child care, and he answered by yammering away about tariffs.
Relax :). We’re just saying that, at his rallies, he’s in “stupid-ass, blithering rant mode” most of the time, whereas in this debate he was in that mode rather less than half the time. Especially in the first 15 minutes of the debate, he was able to rather calmly string together somewhat coherent sentences (lies, of course).
We’re not saying Trump didn’t show his usual astoundingly-unqualified-rumor-driven-crap-artist side in the debate. He did. It’s simply that, for him, there were quite long stretches of less nutty demeanor and content (still lies, obviously).
Maybe you haven’t seen clips from his rallies, so you aren’t aware that he’s capable of worse (i.e., of a higher proportion of raving-lunacy) than what we saw at the debate?
Is it really a higher proportion though? Or selective memory because people mainly get clips?
They’re so meandering and boring that people routinely leave the rallies early. Expecting a live performance to match a “greatest hits” is unrealistic.
