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Notes -
Probably the wrong crowd for this, but I'll ask anyways...
Does anyone know of any long-form podcast interviews with Kamala from a tough or adversarial interviewer? I've listened to three different interviews with her (from Pod Save America, I've Had It, and Sharon McMahon) and they are all of the form "ask softball question, let her say her talking points." None actually interrogate her to try to see if she understands the potential problems with her policy ideas, or to make her defend against the most common criticisms of her policy ideas, or get her to pass any kind of intellectual turing test. Part of the reason I went down this rabbit hole is because I'm curious if Kamala is actually smart or not. But it is difficult to tell if someone is smart if they are never pushed to defend their viewpoints. I'm also curious if she can actually understand the right-wing critique of her immigration positions, or actually lives in such a bubble she has never actually engaged with the critique.
Does it matter?
Trump flops on all the hard questions in a way that asks whether or not there is anything deeper in there than making the liberals cry. Of course there is, and of course he understands but he and every supporter of his don't actually care about that.
Getting dragged into the harder questions is a sign of weakness.
Trump gets at the issues in a much deeper way than all the policy wonks cynically consumed by statistics and specifics. What do you do about the Ukraine War? It's not hard, you get on the phone with Putin, you stop the war with a phone call, this is literally how that works. You don't need answers to "hard questions," you need the vision to lead and inspire.
Sorry, what happens on this phone call?
Trump threatens to bomb Moscow, simple as!
Nah, probably not this time – this time the call just says "cease-fire?"
Obviously the war would actually stop after a lot of wrangling and haggling and might even start up again but if Trump threatened to cut Ukraine's aid off unless they negotiated they almost certainly would show up, and Russia showed up last time.
There would need to be a threat to Russia that if they aren’t somewhat reasonable we would increase funding to Ukraine while providing a carrot of removing sanctions.
There is no threat that the US can make - there's no amount of funding the US can provide that would make up for the current situation. If they deploy force in the amount required to change the outcome of the Ukraine war, they would be unable to defend Israel and Taiwan... and there's a very decent chance that they would actually lose the conflict militarily to boot (assuming no nukes are used, because if they do get used the world just ends). As for removing sanctions, they're already moving to systems of trade and exchange that bypass the US' hold on the financial system because they don't trust it anymore (and can you blame them?) - they'd view it as nice, but they would presumably then just take all their money out and leave anyway.
Sure, Trump would probably be able to negotiate a surrender, but what could the US actually do to change the situation beyond giving up? When you take into account other commitments like Taiwan and Israel there's no stick at all - Trump would just be negotiating the US exit and surrender. That said, my personal view is that the Ukraine war was a terrible idea, a massive waste of blood and treasure, so the sooner that happens the better.
This is delusional. Obliterating the formal militaries of near peer competitors is the one thing the US military is utterly dominant at. The US loses wars when you go all fourth generational warfare and wait for the American public to get tired of hearing about the steady trickle of dead American soldiers and foreign civilians (who are innocent and mostly women ad children, of course).
When was the last time the United States did that in a ground war on the enemy's own territory?
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