An important thing to bear in mind. Add “learned/knowledgeable” to that as well.
You are not the one he is trying to personally dominate.
…
Y’know, the way some people are so locked in to denying that Trump possesses any ability or gift, even if it is a wicked one, can get tiring.
True. But I think it’s clear Trump wanted to remain President and he failed at that. So even by his own standards, he didn’t do a good job.
And he probably good have gotten re-elected by following my plan. Trump was handed a national crisis. And most Americans rally to the President during a national crisis. If Trump had just listened to what the experts were telling him and then repeated it on camera, he would have gotten the credit for leading the country with no serious effort on his part. He could have been re-elected, like most Presidents, and spent the last four years embezzling government money and telling people we need to repeal the 22nd Amendment.
Go read analyses of Republican candidate for pretty much anything since 2016. They seem to be describing a pretty fearful climate in which they can either kiss his ring or get fucked. Even his primary opponents for the Pubby Prez nom are dancing delicately around him instead of going for his throat like you’d expect in a primary season.
So far, he hasn’t acquired the foundation to be able to threaten Democratic Party politicians in the same way, let alone most private citizens who don’t have to face election. But he’s done his best to intimidate judges, Congressional hearings, and may have even leaned on Supreme Court justices (not necessarily effectively, but still). It’s his modality. He’d like to be able to intimidate everyone. To be able to array a batch of his followers outside your living room window if you say something that offends him and gets reported publicly.
Oh, yes, he’s very much into intimidating people. Recall how he loomed over Hillary Clinton during the debates.
Yeah, and she told the asshole to back off.
Trump walked into a room filled with virologists, epidemiologists, and other infectious disease specialists, and to the core of his being believed that he had ideas about curing a newly emergent disease that they hadn’t considered, despite the fact that he almost certainly had never used the word ‘coronavirus’ even once in his life before the pandemic struck.
He so deeply felt that his childish ideas would save us all from this disease, that he stood in front of reporters, repeated those ideas and forced the health professionals to ‘promise’ that they would ‘look into’ them.
This is not what intelligence looks like. He may have skills and unexplained charisma, but anything resembling academic or professional intelligence is long gone, if he ever had any.
Churchill used the same technique in his “We’ shall fight them on the beaches” speech.
"We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas…
That’s an interesting topic in it’s own right.
My take, FWIW, is that it took trump a year or two to get the hang of doing president his way, and of clearing out the “adults in the room” and replacing them all with yes-men enablers. About then he realized that this could be a good gig / con, given enough time for his minions to finish suborning the executive. He just started too late in his term to get all the stuff together for a win or a successful steal by 2020.
I do not think he could have played COVID more successfully, speaking just in terms of how it affected his re-election potential. A conventional President certainly could have. But even if trump’s random feral instincts about COVID happened to align with CDC’s emerging science, the rest of his non-COVID behavior was still going to turn off 50% of the electorate.
By the time we got around to voting in late 2020 the threat was receding, the culture wars about vaxxing and masking were in full swing, and half the country hated the other half. I don’t see how trump pushing masking and vaxxing would have sold well to the freedumb people. He might have lost harder had he taken that line.
Intellectual curiosity is a big part of intelligence.
I may be using the terms incorrectly, but Trump has a level of innate social cognition that is off the charts and baffling to those with a more logic based intelligence. Paired with empathy, this sort of intelligence can be the mark of a great leader. Lacking empathy, you just get a conman who has drunk his own kool-aid.
Churchill used that relatively simple (“subjugated”?) language, elegantly phrased and spoken, with deliberate intelligence.
Trump bumbles along semicoherently with a minuscule vocabulary because that’s all he’s got.
Exactly. It’s very strange to me that he absolutely will NOT allow himself to be on the same side of an issue as someone he considers an adversary, even when it’s things as cut and dried as this.
But he’ll go to great lengths to oppose say… mask mandates, not because he believes that they’re bad or whatever, but because his political opponents are pushing them.
I’ve long thought that the Democratic party is missing a real opportunity to push him around by espousing the opposite of what they want.
I haven’t read the whole thread, but has anyone mentioned that about 40% of the country is straight up idiots that would vote for a straight up idiot? As someone once wisely mentioned, we have a big basket of deplorables.
Well, they also messed up Mr. Vains makeup.
I don’t think Trump is intelligent in the everyday sense of the word. But he knows what’s worked for him his entire life: intimidation and bullying. He developed an oversized, bigger-than-life personality/ego, and continually inflated it. And it’s worked, for the most part. He’s a wannabe mob boss, and emulated both real and fictional bosses in developing his persona.
I’m in the camp that he never really believed he’d win the election. He was doing it to build his brand in a number of ways, and then became the dog that caught the car. Now he’s in too deep, and the only way out is to win again, which he’s trying to do at any cost.
He’s an amoral sociopath (possibly even a psychopath). Intelligent? Not really.
What ‘skill’ does it take to just lie? “What do you people want?” “Jobs as coal miners!” “Well, just coincidently, I’ll open up all the coal mines, and kill anyone who tries to build wind and solar plants!” “Yay, we love you!”
It’s easy to lie. You don’t need polling, or a plan to actually do anything. Just lie, and let the lie waft you into office because the rubes were stupid enough to believe you.
And try those tactics without millions behind them. You’d go bankrupt inside of three years.
Oh, yeah. He managed that anyway.
A ‘special’ set of skills.
He used repetition, but even in that part you quote, he’s using pretty complex sentence structure, with several conditional clauses. Trump wouldn’t get half-way through that before he got himself all confused, and started talking about how great those beaches would be for building condo resorts. And if he somehow managed to stumble his way through it, his fans wouldn’t have understood it. “Why is he talking about us starving? Is he planning on starving us? What happened to that trip to the beach he promised us?!?”
The point is, we wouldn’t have had those culture wars, if Trump hadn’t been leading the “COVID is a hoax!” charge from the very beginning. If he had endorsed masks, social distancing and vaccines all along, the Republicans would have followed along because they’re on his side, and the Democrats would have followed along because they actually understood why masks et al. were a good idea.
It would still have been a close election because of all the other stuff, but maybe the anti-Trump vote wouldn’t have been quite so strong. And even with Biden’s huge lead in the popular vote, the Electoral College still came down to just a few swing states. A moderately less-intolerable Trump might have picked up enough of those swing states to win it.
Geez man, you’re comparing Trump with Churchill? 
Churchill was a master of language, and as @EddyTeddyFreddy already said, that elegant prose you quoted was skillfully crafted for effect. Trump is barely coherent at the best of times and often not at all. His appeal is entirely to imbeciles like himself. The pattern of repetition in Churchill’s quote is dramatically impactful, whereas Trump’s habit of constant repetition comes from a simple brain that is unable to think of anything else to say, and its redundancy is intensely annoying. Combined with his constant lying and general lack of substance, listening to Trump is intolerable.