Today he moved forward again. Said there is nothing wrong with taking campaign info from foreign governments AND he would not allow the US to use a Kim family member as a spy in North Korea. Wacky? Criminal? Does not matter. His plan is to lay down a continuous barrage of BS every day. It amuses his base and gives his opponents so many targets that they cannot launch a focused attack. Watch it. He will defy court orders, issue contradictory instructions and statements, and generally sow confusion. He will appoint incompetents and fanatics to important roles. Congressional Democrats will fume and fuss about each new outrage but fail to pick a few big ones to use effectively against him. Trump is a genius at manipulating cowards and idiots. He will prevail in 2020. Some of his spawn may even follow him in office.
The math is bad for Trump. When you consider that in the states that Trump flipped, he was only barely able to do so and it’s very unlikely that he can exceed his percentages in 2016, it’s clear that he’s in trouble. What Trump wants is to have the race close enough so that if he doesn’t win it, he can contest it. That’s much harder to pull off if he takes on a challenger with the kind of broad appeal that Biden seems to have at the moment. The Democrats need to have someone who can eat into the center and even nibble at the edge of his “base.” That’s why I hope that the Democrats don’t end up voting for someone like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, and why I hope Joe Biden can remain a strong, viable candidate.
You can see Trump’s strategy is to make Joe Biden look old. When he tweets “Sleepy Joe,” he’s hoping it’ll catch on with voters in the primary. Biden and Trump are both in their 70s, but many of Biden’s opponents on the debate stage are younger, and Trump wants to remind voters of that while they’re watching.
Trump taunted Marco Rubio, mocking his manhood. Rubio responded in kind. That tanked his support.
Getting into the mud with Trump (by replicating his mockery, for instance) is not a good move. The mud is Trump’s natural environment. He will always have the advantage there.
There’s this perception of him as some sort of evil genius whose every move is a brilliant strategic masterpiece. In truth, he’s a toddler with a tweeter. He has no master plan. He thinks that if he mobilizes the base enough, he can write off everyone else. The trouble (for him) is that his base is always riled up and motivated, they’re convinced that illegal Mexican Muslim terrorists are going to force gay boy scout marriages and Shariah law and rape all of the white women and steal all of our jobs. These whack-a-doodles don’t need constant reassurance that their conspiracy theories are right or need continuous incentive to turn out and vote Republican- they already do that. The MAGAbots are fewer than before due to them dying off faster than they’re being replaced. All the Democrats have to do is nominate someone who doesn’t scare the piss out of moderate voters and it’s easy flips of WI, MI, PA and possibly FL.
Rubio had the problem that he was competing for the same voters that Trump had. Yes, nobody is going to beat Trump down in the mud.
But the deeper Trump gets in the mud, the more trouble he has with all the voters who aren’t muddy.
Trump’s getting blinded by his rallies and he thinks that the people who show up and cheer for him constitute a majority. But he’s losing support from outside his base, even among the swing voters who might vote for a different Republican.
The knuckle-walking Trog right has always believed itself to be in the majority. At most, they will qualify that as being “real” Americans. They didn’t even blink when Il Douche claimed that Hillary got three million illegal votes (or was it five million? Piddling details…) Was a time, they had some foundation in truth, but that has eroded over time, now it is simply a self-serving myth. But they believe it.
And if the blue wave rises and Pharaoh’s army gets drownded by ten million votes? They will marvel and amaze at how many illegal votes the Dems managed to get. So let it be written, so let it be done…
It’s not so much that it’s genius strategy, as that it is a simple seat-of-the-pants from-the-gut approach, and his baffled opponents, who expect there must be some gameplay, are caught on their back foot and try to react on the run and end up flailing and only hurting themselves. Ted Cruz talks about representing New York Values and it only causes both the liberal and the conservative tabloids in NY to flip him off on the front page. We already heard about Marquito. Hillary says he appeals to deplorable people – he does, but look where it gets her.
Being confident that he is at a hard disadvantage and there’s no way he can win “if only the Dems make the right move” is a horrible mistake. First because yes, he can win in spite of him being horrible and his opponent better qualified - ***he already did!! ***-- , secondly from the advantage of incumbency and enthusiastic base. Third, alas, because “if only the Dems make the right move” is something that brings strong men to tears; the Democratic Party have made an art form of blowing a sure thing while too busy stepping on their own dicks.