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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?
I wish to do a follow up. Ignore the following if you do not wish to read a bit of venting.
I am angry. I am actually fucking enraged. It's irrational, but I hope people don't hold it against me. This is the fucking best that the anti-left coalition can do politically when running a Presidential candidate? Really? This fucking idiot whose idea of a good debate performance is acting like a fucking 15 year old who makes really basic mistakes and failed to prepare? If so, we might be fucked and we might need to get the fuck out of these leftist cities before things get worse, well those of us who still live in them, I mean. Not that I ever expected Trump to do much about local leftist politics, but I am worried that a Harris win might energize the left and make things worse.
The current right is kind of fucking useless unless you care about abortion, or about minor wins in things besides abortion.
Curtis Yarvin, for all his faults, such as some of his misunderstandings of history or his overestimation of what his preferred political systems would manage to accomplish, keeps seeming to be proven right in some core ways. The left is structurally stronger, the so-called right focuses on the wrong things. Like when they were overjoyed when Trump won in 2016, but that ended up not necessarily being a bigger win for the anti-left than when Musk bought Twitter, cause when Trump became President he mostly sat around Tweeting and getting blocked in his policy suggestions, whereas when Musk bought Twitter he ripped some new ideas right into the heart of what was largely before a leftist-dominated idea-shaping space.
Trump might win in November, though I do not evaluate his chances as good, but even if he does, what of it? Will he do anything more than he did last time he was President? I want actual wins, not symbolic wins, and I'm not sure I'll even get a symbolic win for the current anti-leftist coalition any time soon. To be fair, it's not like I've been doing much to help other than posting online. But in any case, fuck. From the perspective of my preferred political outcomes, I think there must be a major re-evaluation of strategy - what is going on now does not seem to be working.
Not that I ever liked this anti-left coalition much to begin with. I just want to live in a city that isn't full of insane violent people, and I want to not be censored online. I don't care much about abortion, I'm not religious in the least bit, and I am not a white nationalist, even though I am a race realist.
To get from where we are now to the kinds of policies I want will take some effort and maybe even a bit of higher-dimensional magic, higher-dimensional in the sense meaning that it goes outside the lines of what we typically imagine now as politics and taps into some deeper currents of existence and reality and life.
From the outside, the problem is all the supposedly "better" right-wing candidates fail more spectacularly, at least in the US in elections that aren't in blood-red areas.
Or at least ones that people of your political persuasion would agree with.
But J.D. Vance underran the entire Republican ticket in Ohio in 2022. Blake Masters lost a winnable Senate race. All of the other politicians somewhat friendly to your sort of arguments are in deep red seats a corpse could win reelection too. Hell, I wouldn't say Mark Robinson is on your side, but he's a populist right-winger of a sort and he's losing by 10 in North Carolina. Maybe I can give you DeSantis, but he fell on his face on the national stage.
Obviously, this would not be the real result, but they polled a Harris-Vance race, and it was 59-37 Harris. That's with the guy among current politicians, I'd argue, is the most normie-friendly of your set.
Trump's celebrity + Hillary running + COVID helping Trump like it did every other incumbent politician (only he was incompetent enough to blow the COVID boost basically all incumbents got worldwide) gave a sheen on Trump's political popularity that gave you guys the idea that people liked your ideas than they really did.
If the choice for the median voter is an HR lady stomping on their face forever telling them to put their gender in their bio and calling people by their chosen name or whatever you guys are selling, until you find somebody far better at selling yourself to normies, not online weirdos (I say this as an online weirdo of another political ideology), the HR ladies are going to keep winning, at least in the US.
Yes, with a dip in the economy, a Brian Kemp/Joni Ernest ticket in 2028 could totally win if Trump eats one too many Big Mac's, but that's not what the online right want
Blake Masters and JD Vance sound like fucking nerds. Masters especially looked and sounded like a geek who needed rectangle glasses and a job locked in the basement server room of a nondescript midwestern company.
The right desperately needs a handsome, happily married, tall, moderately successful 40-50 year old man who is very good at public speaking and who can persuasively impart a conservative populist message without scaring the hoes. Fifty such men surely aren’t impossible to find in a country of 330 million people. It’s an extraordinary failure that they can’t find them, which really means they just don’t care to look.
I’m glad you said this, because it confirms my perception that Masters has terrible physiognomy. To me he always seemed to have (as Shakespeare’s Caesar said of Cassius) “a lean and hungry look.” Very untrustworthy face. I say this as someone whose physiognomy would likely trigger mostly the same reaction in voters; at least I know I’m unelectable.
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