My job is to kill hitler and I’m prepping right now just in case.
Regarding his stupidity, I remember seeing a news report that compared interviews with him from several decades ago with more recent ones. He was able to use more complex language in the earlier clips, with more complex sentences and more vocabulary. In short, the idea is that he’s suffered a cognitive decline.
Or that he’s reaching to a dumber audience now and is sharp enough to adapt.
I don’t know if this is the same video, but this one from New York Magazine compares thirty-year-old clips with more recent ones.
There was a similar analysis of Reagan:
Ronald Reagan’s speeches showed the beginnings of Alzheimer’s before diagnosis
Words and phrases used by Ronald Reagan showed his mental state was deteriorating years before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, new research has shown
Here’s one guy’s take on Trump:
Psychiatrist: Trump Pre-Dementia & Cognitive Decline Getting Worse
I wish I hadn’t brought up the catchphrase. It’s not relevant to my main point, which is that stupid as Trump might be–and he is very stupid–he’s good at rallying crowds and exciting people. Again, he didn’t just win the general in 2016, he won the Republican primary too. He beat Ted Cruz, an actual right wing evangelical Christian conservative. You may not see his charisma, but I guarantee you it is there. I sincerely hope the Democrats don’t underestimate him again. The charismatic outsider always wins against the establishment insider, and even as incumbent Trump is still able to pose as an outsider; no mean feat.
I’m worried Trump will plow through Biden like Adrian Peterson plowing through a pee-wee league defense.
You have a very good and important point— that trump is not to be underestimated. He was underestimated in 2016. I don’t know if I’d call what he has charisma, exactly; he has a knack for shameless self-promotion that his base mistakes for confidence and success. And he has an almost feral ability to bully and intimidate his opponents, and create imaginary enemies (Antifa! Caravans of M-13 gang members!), which his base mistakes for “toughness and leadership”. He feeds off the adulation of crowds because of his malignant narcissism; he breathes it in like oxygen.
But the more his odious tactics fire up and excite the certain type of person who makes up his base, the more he repels others. He managed to squeak an electoral college victory because, maybe by accident, he was able to walk a fine enough line to be trumpish enough to fire up his base while still managing to con enough others.
Can he do it again? I said in the clusterfuck thread about his attacking peaceful protesters and rioters alike, both verbally and actually with National Guard troops: at first I thought what he was doing was political suicide, even for him. But then I thought, this is really the only path available to him: fire up his base while scaring moderate suburban voters who otherwise despise him that scary dark anarchist types are going to overrrun their neighborhoods, and only “Law and Order” trump can stop the anarchy. So, basically what worked for him in 2016: fire up the base, con just enough other voters. Will it work? Will it spectacularly backfire on him this time? There are signs of the latter, but I honestly don’t know.
Trump won in 2016 and that caught us by surprise. I am one of the many who thought he didn’t have a chance because nobody would vote for that idiot. We won’t be caught off guard a second time.
But we shouldn’t overestimate Trump either. He didn’t earned most of his successes; they were handed to him. His father was a billionaire who set him up in business and bailed him out when he failed. He had a TV series because Mark Burnett created a show for him and NBC put him on the air. The Russians decided to fund him because he’d be a useful dupe in office. The Republican Party built up a system that allows a Republican candidate to come in second place and still get elected President. Trump’s entire life has been other people walking him by the hand up to the finish line and then telling him to step across it and Trump then claiming all the credit for how he won the race.
It may happen again. Fred Trump’s dead, Mark Burnett can’t vote, and Vlad Putin has probably had second thoughts. But the Republican Party might still decide it’s in their best interest to push Trump through a second term. But one thing is clear; if Trump gets a second term it won’t be thanks to anything he did.
I find it very odd that you’re ignoring the massive impact of the conservative/russian propaganda mill in depressing support for Clinton. Trump didn’t walk a fine line; his opponent had weights tied to her ankles. (And still got more votes than him.)
Which is not to say that the conservative/russian propaganda mill has gone anywhere in the meantime, and they may be able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat a second time. But that doesn’t change the fact that Trump’s so-called charisma would not have propelled him to the finish line if others hadn’t dragged the finish line backwards to meet him halfway.
And it may be that was his plan. But I think that the George FLoyd murder changed his timeline, and forced him to go with the “Antifa are coming for you and your women!” bullshit a little too early.
Now we have bumfuck towns going goofy and bunches of white militia wandering the streets looking for strangers with dark complexions. And they look like idiots. People are laughing at them.
By the time the election rolls around, this kind of bullshit is not going to work as well the second time. Oh, it will work, because… Morons… But not as well.
Thanks. I think this misses a point about his approach though. It’s not just all hate. He is also able to convince people that he is on their side, on the side of the forgotten and ignored people in flyover country who are despised by the same coastal elite who depend on them for food and energy. He’s capable of projecting warmth, and you’ll miss it if you only see the more outrageous parts of the rallies. There was one smaller event where he invited an older vet to come on stage. When it became obvious that the vet couldn’t, Trump went to him and shook his hand. Even the infamous “get that baby out of here” line was taken out of context. He was bantering with the mom, who was laughing. He can sell “I’m with you” just as well as he can sell “Evil gangs are coming to rape and murder you.”
Yeah, he’s taking a big gamble here, but I don’t see that he’s got much choice. That’s why he’s holding a rally in Tulsa on juneteenth. I think he’s trying to troll protesters and incite violence, so he can sell himself as a strong leader who will protect real Americans.
As for the Russian stuff, my eyes can’t roll back any further. People voted for Trump because they liked him, or at least they preferred him to Clinton. The Russian influence was trivial. Most of what they were trying to do was sow discord in the US. They preferred Trump, but they would have been OK with a Clinton who was hamstrung by popular resentment. Also, Americans do not need Russian help to believe in conspiracy theories. They can do that on their own. I realize people were shocked in 2016 and need somebody to blame, but Putin did not install Trump in office. 60+ million Americans did.
I suppose he must be able to simulate some degree of warmth at times or he wouldn’t have gotten as far as he has. What’s the old joke? “Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that you got it made”. I do get on right wing media from time to time to try to see see how they think, and I read trump’s tweets and the responses, but it’s true I’ve only ever seen the most outrageous snippets of his rallies; I haven’t had the stomach to watch one all the way through.
Um, not ignoring the Russian tampering, I think it’s a very serious thing and I’m disgusted that the Republican Senate refuses to take any action to stop it in the future after being presented with clear evidence of it. I don’t know how much difference the Russian tampering made in the general election, but he did destroy a large number of Rebublicans trying to get the nomination to get there, through sheer bullying and belittling tactics. And Republicans who spoke out dead set against him, later turned into lickspittle toadies. So yes, trump is very stupid in many ways, but Mr. Borgia has a point that he should not be underestimated.
I think you meant Sarajevo in June 1914
In January 2017 Trump was presented with the opportunity of using the most visible platform in the world to say and do things that would win over some of his many critics. Instead, he doubled down, alienating his critics even more and instead choosing to pursue a higher level of support and turnout from a diminishing percentage of the electorate who loved the way he went after the nation’s “enemies,” even if it meant that he continually stepped on his own dick in order to do so.
This doesn’t look like a smart strategy. But maybe there are still enough people out there, just enough, to give the stupidest president in my lifetime another four years. We’re not a particularly discerning country.
Dang it! [recalibrating]
Trump has a bit of Charisma, I’ll grant. But it’s not his Charisma that won him the election. It’s that the RW media has spent a generation converting normal people into seething dipshits. Trump resonates with them because he’s one of them. Vapidly believing everything the RW media tells him and in a rage at imagined evils caused by liberals.
“Mr. Pardel, I know that this has been a stressful time for you, and I want you to be assured that The Chicago Police are very grateful for your cooperation. Officer Hernandes here is our police sketch artist and he’s been listening to everything you’ve been saying while I’ve been taking your report. He’s actually pretty good at what he does and well… Mr. Pardel… is this the man that you saw committing all of those felonies…?”
You should apologize to the russians for belittling their hard work. I realize that it can be hard to sort out the russian propaganda from the republican propaganda, but it’s not like the resentment for Clinton or the conservative “we deny all reality and facts now” mindset happened on their own. You can aver that Fox News managed to create that all by itself, but in that case why were the russians bothering? They know how propaganda works, and would know if the pub stuff was working on its own.
I don’t get the impression that he bothers with warmth or ever has. He is all in on the “I’m a shitty asshole who will be able to hurt the people you hate” shtick, and that’s what he rode to office - the idea that he was going to bust heads and break down old institutions. (Which would presumably cause the ‘good old days’ to snap back into existence to fill the newly-created void, since Trump certainly wasn’t going to repair anything.)
I freely concede that I don’t know when the russians started supporting Trump, and I don’t know that they didn’t help him in the primary. But he very likely wouldn’t have needed it there. Ever since the introduction of the southern strategy the republicans have been deliberately courting and encouraging the shitty bigoted racist gun-toting brutes of their base - positioning themselves as their party (while the democrats were the party of pansy politically-correct milquetoasts). The republicans gathered this type of shit person to the fold, enjoying their votes, while maintaining a higher standard of decorum for themselves in order not to be reviled by everyone not in the shitty part of their base. So when trump rolled in as a personification of the type of shit person the republicans has been gathering to themselves, he resonated with them - and thus was able to sweep the republican primaries. But that only worked in the republican primaries, which had a high concentration of shit people there. It wouldn’t work on the average swing voter. (Those types either fell for his tough-guy posturing or were simply persuaded to hate Clinton.)
A line from Neal Stephenson’s Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: Stupidity is power.
Trump is stupid. Trump is in power. Statement is proven true.
No way! He’s at the very bottom of every bell curve that describes human behaviour. He’s repulsive in every way.