I think he’s betting that he will. He’s not trying to gain or demotivate Black voters, he’s trying to excite White ones with his transgressiveness. He’s not playing to the audience in that room.
Also I agree with you that Trump probably wasn’t expecting any kind of harsh questioning. His team is careful to insulate him against criticism; he has handlers that give him hard copies of favorable news coverage and opinions to feed his ego, and he mostly interviews with places like Fox News that are careful to pose everything in as positive a way as possible.
So he must have been shocked that they weren’t slobbering all over him with praise, and thought he was fully justified to lash out at them.
Agreed here as well. I mentioned in a previous post this was one of the more bizarre political events I’ve ever witnessed. After stepping back from what was actually said, I realized that this is not a rally, nor a carefully structured debate setting. He looked completely out of his element.
I know he used to do straight up interviews more frequently, but this seemed an odd choice for him.
As I’ve said before, Trump has exactly three core beliefs that guide everything he does;
- Donald Trump is very rich
- Donald Trump is very smart
- Everybody loves Donald Trump
He absolutely expects adulation from any room he walks into, and he loses his cool when he doesn’t get it.
This is from twelve years ago, and may have changed as the people in question became more Americanized, but:
Not black, but Habasha: Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants in American society
If Harris loses a small number of votes because of being the child of immigrants, rather than a descendent of enslaved people then living in the United States, or an Ethiopian-American, those voters will have come to their own unfortunate conclusions, and putting Trump in the mix isn’t going to have swayed them. I think the slight value, to Trump, of the racist slur, is to take attention away from Harris, rather than the content of the slur.
I’ve seen this a lot on reddit: people angrily posting, “Don’t be so complacent! She could still lose!” Except I don’t see anyone being “complacent”. What we are now is optimistic.
I’m less pessimistic than I was. As a result, if Trump wins, I’ll be even more dissapointed.
It does seem that Trump should have lost some votes with the Harris-not-Black meme.
His team knew that he may be harshly questioned, but also that they had at least one, Harris Faulkner, on their side.
He wasn’t trying to win progressives to his side here, it’s all about the margins now. It was an appeal to black voices in social media, like YouTube and twitter, kind of like Vance is trying to do.
I’m sure he’s got one of the so-called new black media youtubers with at least 200k subs on his team. He is trying to hit their talking points.
I think Trump is just trying to “other” Kamala Harris to argue that blacks shouldn’t support her because she isn’t what she claims to be… which is kind of hilarious coming from the guy who has absolutely nothing in common with most of his typical audience (not the journalists at this event).
He’s also working in some anti-trans rhetoric too, in suggesting that people pick whichever identity will favor them the most in any given situation. You know, like how he told E. Jean Carroll that he wanted to try on some lingerie so that she’d go into a change room with him.
Voting for Trump not being the goal, the goal and message is not to vote at all, because it doesn’t really matter.
Former President Donald Trump was asked about his pronouns on Fox News, and his answer left critics shaking their heads.
In the second part of an interview that aired Tuesday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham mentioned that Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has “she/her” in her social media bio to indicate her pronouns.
“What are your pronouns?” Ingraham asked Trump.
“I have no — I don’t want pronouns,” the Republican nominee said.
“So, you’re fluid? What is that?” Ingraham replied.
“Nobody even knows what that means. Ask her to describe exactly what that means,” Trump added.
Cross dressing? Gender fluid? Want to tell us something Donny?
What is the overlap between these supposed reverse-one drop rule (“If you have one drop of non-Southern American slave blood then you do not get to call yourself Black”) voters and the 7% of the Black vote who did not vote for Obama? Is there anyone who could possibly claim that Harris would have had any better success getting an apartment from a Trump company back in the 70s because she isn’t “really black”? The term back then was “passing”, and Kamala ain’t passing…
We already know he likes CD’s, look at the video with him and Juliani. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he was wearing panties under his suit.
It’s a thing.
Are there any examples of them which you could share?
I’m not really good with political predictions, but I think the performance today secured a Landslide.
And he’s going to continue to flap his gums for another 3 months!
You know the scary thing - you’d like to think so, but you might be wrong. Be VERY careful that you do not overestimate the American voting public.
Well no of course not. She would be on the black side of the one drop rule back then. They wouldn’t really try to break it down any more than that. I was born in 1971 for what its worth.
It would just be assumed she is not white; they wouldn’t care what she was mixed with.
Here is one downplaying project 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vSdHcCvcjQ&t=2s
140k subs there and while I don’t think he is a Trump fan, he is defiantly suppressing the young black vote with what he is talking about here.
And this is going to lose him margins. Because he’s an idiot.
Now this makes more sense. There’s a big difference between “You’re not Black enough, I’m not going to vote for you”, and “You’re not Black enough, I’m going to vote for Trump!”
But his ham-handed attempt to suppress the Black vote by applying racism is just as likely to bring out new voters.