Don’t they already do that, though? There is no conservative who hasn’t gotten this memo already.
I don’t see any strategy behind this beyond typical Trump impulsiveness. He’s tired of these “uppity bitches” calling out his treatment of immigrants so he attempts to take them down a peg. That’s it. Let’s not make this more calculated than it is. He has to bully people to keep up his narcissistic supply.
No, that’s not it at all – this is just completely misdiagnosing the situation.
Consider the fact that perhaps the single biggest and worst political ass kicking Trump has sustained so far was the government shutdown, which was not necessarily set up by Pelosi, but she played it masterfully once he realized what he was about to do. Pelosi stayed out of the way. And she made him own the shutdown. Not only that, Pelosi made him cry uncle and most people agree - right and left - that Donald Trump lost that match. It was Pelosi, not AOC, not the Squad, not even Chuck Schumer who beat Trump. It was Pelosi. To boot, she has zinged him a few times and again since.
Trump realizes he has no answer for Pelosi. He can’t figure out how to beat her because she knows what his vulnerabilities are. What made matters even worse was that he didn’t know what Pelosi’s vulnerabilities were – until now, that is. Pelosi’s vulnerability isn’t Pelosi; it’s the Bernie and Justice Democratic wing of the party, which wants to play by its own rules and doesn’t want to be told to conform and fly in formation, because that’s not what revolutionaries do, I guess. Trump saw something within the past couple of weeks. He realized that Pelosi may not be able to control the progressives, and that the issues that can sow the deepest divisions are divisions along race. He knows that the Democratic party has become more than just the party that embraces diversity; it’s the party in which embracing diversity is a litmus test – which it should be, IMO. The problem is, sometimes that litmus test can be weaponized. And that’s what AOC’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti and AOC herself have done: they’re weaponizing identity politics because it was the only card they could play to shake up the party and force Pelosi to pay attention. It’s akin to a four year old child breaking toys at Toys-R-US so that mommy will buy her a toy.
Look at the timing of this quote (July 12):
Heck, go back a few weeks to just after the debate and look how he even kinda gave a half-hearted defense of Biden.
The question is why would Trump go out of his way to defend Biden and Pelosi? Why play nice with a guy who, according to polls, is potentially an election match-up disaster?
Today’s tweet answered that question. He knows that by pushing racial buttons, Trump himself will become even more toxic to the Democratic party than he is now. He wants to get racial, partly to play to his base, but partly to kick the hornets nest that’s hanging over the Democratic party. Pelosi and Biden are now in a position where moderation starts to look more and more like weakness, more like Nazi collaborators, and Trump can make that happen.
It has less to do with him defending Biden and Pelosi and more to do with him trying to marginalize AOC and Harris. You know, like he and other conservatives have been doing since 1776. You are ascribing too much masterminded depth if you think this isn’t just him siding with white people to vilify mouthy black and brown people.
Moderation does look like weakness when you have a racist demagogue in the office. It’s been looking this way long before this tweet. Consider the possibility that this revelation doesn’t have to be manufactured by Trump to be felt and appreciated.
Trump could have kept silent and let the House D caucus tear itself apart, but noOOOoo!
I don’t disagree: the conservatives want to marginalize AOC, Harris, and others, but in fact, I think they want to set it up so that they marginalize each other. Trump and his allies want a dynamic in which non-whites and hard-left progressives insist on a more authentic candidate, and the conservatives also want to set it up so that white voters see non-white candidates get turned off by the progressives. But even more than that: the more that Democrats are consumed with anti-Trump rage, the more consumed they are with social justice, it’s probably true that they will be less effective at governance. They’ll spend less time talking about the issues that unify progressives of all stripe: healthcare, fair taxation, labor protection, and those kinds of issues. In short, it’s a game of divide and conquer.
Yeah, agreed. I don’t get why people even on the left struggle with that idea of Trump constantly playing N dimension chess.
He’s a stupid cunt. He’s been elected by stupid cunts (and boosted by a Russian archcynic) *because *he’s a stupid cunt. That’s all there is. There’s no plan, no strategy, no wheels within wheels. The dumb cunt just says the first thing that comes to his, for lack of a better term, brain at all times - which most often is what the people on teevee said that bellyfelt so true, so true, believe me it felt so true ; but other times is just addled bigoted cunt stuff. FFS the man can’t even muster the intellectual fortitude to power through the first page of a two page memo, and you guys think he’s Constantine Machiavelli Borgia up in there ? Get a grip.
The social media bots can and do say both of those things, at the same time, right now.
Assuming this his strategy, it will work only if white moderates do what I alluded to earlier: shrinking away from doing anything that might possibly cost them conservative-leaning white votes. And being real obvious about such appeasement. This is a reputation that they’ve earned for a reason, but at least Trump’s tweet is so blatantly awful that it requires little progressive “wokeness” to condemn it. Biden should be thanking Trump for this rare opportunity…assuming he takes advantage of it.
Again, I don’t disagree with you: folks like Biden and Pelosi can’t be shrinking violets, and they also need to communicate.
At the same time, the entire campaign can’t be simply about Trump’s racism. Almost all of his opponents in 2016 talked about how un-Christian and racist Donald Trump was, and they all went down, one by one. I don’t like saying this, but for the white majority that will ultimately decide this race, racism in and of itself isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker.
Trump is grossly, laughably incompetent in most aspects of his job, but he understands the dynamics of power, he understands when his enemies are weak, and he understands how to weaponize race and use it as a divisive tactic. You don’t have to be competent, stable, or a chess player to understand these things.
I don’t think he does. Understanding one’s enemies means empathizing with them on some level. Putting oneself in oneother’s shoes (jeez, that was tortured. Sorry). Understanding the dynamics of power means understanding at least the very basics of obfuscation, or grokking sincerity even if it’s only in others. Trump cannot do that. He understandsTV ratings and his own popularity by wrestling federation standards. He does not understand what makes others popular or unpopular - he only evaluates others by his own fucked up prism, and the applaudimeter of self-selected venues. That’s it. It goes no deeper than that. I doubt he even understands why some people object to his shit.
Also he fucking cancelled a war he was set on starting because some cumrag on FoxNews said he wouldn’t get re-elected if he started a war. He ripped the Iran deal because Obama bad. He doesn’t understand SHIT. He plans fuck all. He’s winging it on some irate chimpanzee level and you’re twisting yourself into a pretzel trying to figure what it all really means. Stop that. Just embrace the retardation. I grok that it’s humiliating on some level to be ruled by, to have been electorally beaten by a chimpanzee but… it is what it is, and it ain’t what it ain’t, you feel me ?
I mean this is a guy who, to this day, regularly mails PR photos of himself with the hands circled in gold sharpie to some journalist who, 20 years ago, wrote that his hands were small-ish. And you think that’s a guy who understands the dynamics of power ? Come the fuck on. He’s no id, not super-anything, all ego all the time. You could emulate his decision-making process with a dachsund and a bouncy ball.
Most of what you’re talking about has nothing to do with his tweets on race. I don’t disagree that Trump is an impulsive adolescent, but this is also a man who instinctively knew that he could win a national election using racist themes. And his instincts turned out to be right when all the experts told him he couldn’t be more wrong. Trump might not know a lot, but he understands the emotions of naive, confused, ignorant white people – he understands their fears of the brown man in the same way that Hitler understood and exploited fears of the Jew. White people are Trump’s audience, and this was his latest performance. In this way, people write him off at their peril.
It’s a mistake to believe that demagogues are necessarily competent or that they’re chess players. They’re quite often dangerously incompetent when it comes to running an enterprise by conventional standards. They’re quite often riddled with personal insecurities and psychosis that can be borderline crippling. But what they understand almost on some instinctive level is how to exploit and manipulate people. Trump never has been a real businessman; he’s always been an organized criminal. He can’t run a legal legitimate enterprise without going bankrupt, so even in his business pursuits, he’s just as incompetent and unhinged as he is in his politics. And yet, he survives. He still has “Trump” on buildings all over the world. And he can do this because he has learned how to manipulate people, and he has learned how to use holes in the system to do it. By conventional standards, Trump is an impulsive buffoon, but he has a reptilian instinct for survival.
For one thing, he instinctively knew fuck all. He’s been peddling that shit for a long time. Remember when he had his best people investigating in Hawai and they couldn’t believe what they were finding out ?
His broke ass clock happened to reverberate with America’s broke ass voters. That’s it. You presume calculation and savvy when there’s just blind luck (or not, considering his investiture photos), the pinpoint accuracy of flinging spaghetti at a wall and making shit up.
Populism is easy. Uniting people against a made up threat is easy. I mean that in utmost seriousness : Hitler was an absolute retard in every single way. So is Trump.
He understands fuck all in the same way Hitler understood fuck all. Both just spewed out the content of their brainsphincters and it happened to either resonate with their electorate, or was stupendously retarded enough that people with which it did not resonate in the least figured it was nevertheless good cover, controllable, an adequate mask and what have you. Hitler was SHIT before he wound up becoming, you know, capital H Hitler. He never planned on becoming capital H Hitler. His ideas were moronic. His understanding of military strategy, economy, social policies were moronic. It’s just that at the start he was a useful moron, and later on he was a scary moron with lots of scariers morons with guns at his beck and call.
Hitler wasn’t a genius manipulator. Hitler was a retard. The Tiger tank is my cite.
See, now he’s even demanding that his targets apologize, which any sane person can tell is a deliberate attempt to troll them. But more than that, he knows it exerts pressure on the Democratic party. If Joe Biden thought he was going to run a safe, moderate campaign, he can throw that plan in the garbage can. He’ll have to up his ‘wokeness’ game by a lot. If Pelosi thought that she can just build coalitions with moderates and progressives working together in unison without having serious infighting over social justice, she can throw those plans in the garbage can as well. Trump is firing up the progressive radicals, and he knows it. And Biden and Pelosi are going to struggle to contain that energy. I’ve been talking about polarization for quite a long time now, long before this latest controversy started. Polarization is how Donald Trump re-takes the White House. It’s the only way he can win.
(I do apologize for using the word “retard” so freely - I understand it upsets some people, is considered a derogative due to its historical association with people struggling with mental illnesses and so on- again, I’m sorry. I do not mean to offend you guys in any way. It’s just the only word that “fits” with my sentiment in my limited foreigner’s rhetorico-emotional vocab.)
You’ve made my point.
Exactly this. On some level, Trump understands that the natural next step for the GOP was overt white nationalism and that it provides him with an avenue for wealth and power. Instead of talking in the dog whistles that the GOP usually engages in, he just picked up a bullhorn and went all in. It wouldn’t surprise me if his base starts chanting “go back where you came from” at his next rallies.
No. Just no. Don’t you see ? There’s no “more than that”. It’s just trolling. Because it’s funny to be a bully and his base eat that shit up. That’s it. You’re projecting all that other words.