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Well, this is the Trump experience. I mean this debate. He started out really strong, was totally defeating Harris for the first ten minutes or so. Then he just couldn't help but start rambling and making unforced errors. Why decide to bring up abortion and ramble about ninth month abortion? That's not one of the Republicans' strengths. Why bring up Marxism? Outside of the highly online left and right, people generally think of Marxism as some boring thing from decades ago, not as an important issue. Why bring up the Springfield pets thing? That's another highly online issue that plays weird to normies.
Why not just focus on your strengths of crime, the economy, and immigration? He's starting to try to pivot more back to those now, but now he's rambling and raising his voice and acting defensive, which looks bad.
This guy has always sucked at debates other than in the 2016 primaries and when he got to go up against Biden a few months ago, but almost anyone could have won that debate against Biden.
Kamala is a competent but relatively weak debater, a strong debater could easily run rings around her. But Trump has learned nothing, it seems, from past debate performances. He keeps making the same kinds of unforced errors and making himself look bad. He can't stop himself from getting defensive and rambling and bringing up stuff that most people don't care about, or even stuff that favors his opponent.
If he could have just stayed calm and focused, he would have this debate in the bag by now. Instead he is fumbling it. How the fuck can a man have nine years of experience at politics and political debating and not learn the simple lesson of staying calm and looking calm and tough when the context makes it the right decision, instead of getting flustered and emotional all the time?
Shower thoughts: I watched some of it and was deeply unimpressed with both. Just constant lying and avoiding answering questions to deliver intelligence insulting propaganda soundbites instead. I hate American presidential debates and continue to do so.
As someone that I would self-categorize as "crazy person," namely I consider myself a socialist and a Marxist but I hate woke and what the modern establishment Democrats have become, I was flirting with the idea of protest voting Donald Trump. I think this debate pretty much sealed me against that.
In particular his two stances refusing to concede and admit he lost the 2020 election, that it was stolen, and supplication to Russia/Putin by refusing to endorse defense of Ukraine were red lines to me.
Unlike a lot of people, I don't have a lot of problem with Jan. 6 and hardly buy into the establishment Democrat narrative that it was some sort of horrific never again atrocity and affront to "democracy" (read: their deep state establishment power) "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure." and so on. I think it's kind of cool the Congress felt some real fear of the people for once, actually. That said, Democracy depends on people accepting they lost and acknowledging the winners as legitimate leaders to work with. A refusal to do this is a dangerous and destructive degradation of western civilization. I don't know if Trump genuinely has a mental problem or if he's just playing to his base that can't accept loss, but either way it's totally unacceptable. Likewise, I don't know where this subservience to Russia comes from, other than again playing to his retard extremely online base, but it's not okay. The USA shouldn't be bowing to anyone. They both bow to Israel though - which would be a red line for me too except.. yeah. It's was sadly expected and there's no apparent escape from the domination.
Apparently Trump also commented on Marxism but I missed that. Well obviously I oppose that as a slur, but that's pretty unique to me I guess. I was already severely backing off from strategic protest hearing that J.D. Vance endorsed some insane Red Scare book that promotes the "Cultural Marxism" myth and argues that democracy is bad and the them are subhumans trying to get you, if you don't get them first. No proof Vance actually read and liked the book for real, but apparently Trump is all in on this shit. It's a reminder that there's no real strategic friendship here. No socially conservative "populist" economics helping born Americans grow strong with brotherhood. In the end they will still sell out America to the elite monied globalists. They will still cut taxes for rich people and pollute the world. They will always pander to & reflect the culture and politics of the lowest IQ band of whites. I hate Democrats, progressives, and wokies. But Conservatives and you people are just plain evil and nothing good can come from this rotten soil. Sad.
Sidebar: looking up that Jefferson quote more interesting things arise from the letter to what I believe is a response to Shays's Rebellion
Truly there is nothing new under the sun.
Personally I think I’ve arrived at, somewhat more charitably than the norm, I guess, that Trump’s advisors told him he needed a certain amount of votes to win the election, based on their forecast of turnout. He fixated on this to an unusual degree. Of course turnout was higher than expected, and so the votes to win was higher than expected, but he hit the old metric and I think felt entitled to win based on that. He couldn’t emotionally reconcile the dissonance. So he was hyper receptive to any and all theories that would confirm his gut feeling, and distrust of the media only amplified this (and of course he had a few too many yes-men around). At some point in the last few years I’m sure intellectually he finally realized this incongruity, but as a TV guy knows that the underdog, mistreated, but secretly a winner narrative is decently powerful. So he’s currently playing it up, but originally I think this was an honest but plainly flagrantly wrong belief.
As to Russia and many foreign policy issues, frankly I still, years later, really don’t have a good mental model for why Trump does anything that he does. The closest I can come is that he just flies by the seat of his pants on literally every decision.
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