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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?
The greatest Trump sin of 2024 is that he has lost the touch. All the criticisms of his rambling, incoherence, inchoate arguments or whatever, all that is secondary to his greatest strength: hitting the opponent where it'll hurt.
Crooked Hilary resonated as there was sufficient baggage in the info sphere to make it plausible that she was a corrupt incompetent burying bodies on her path to unearned power. Sleepy Joe was obvious to everyone who actually saw Biden speak from 2023 onwards, regardless of right-wing twitter edits. Lyin Ted, Fat Chris, etc... its all the same principle.
And if its not personal, its hitting on values. 2016 Trump hit the immigration nail beautifully with Build The Wall, and he got supercharged with the anger of normies following the Deplorables incident. Frankly he should have swung for the fences in 2020 with Defund the Police, but he fumbled the responde and Biden disavowed Defund from the start, leaving that round a dud in the Trump gun.
That was then. Now? He's got JD Vance, an attack dog that is whining more than biting, a right wing media ecosystem catastrophizing Ring Of Fire disasters out of very real but currently statistically ineffective culture war pain points, and weak attacks against Kamala. He isn't funny, he isn't hitting the pain points of economy and immigration with sufficient focus, and he's ultimately BORING.
Even the supercuts of Trump best lines are boring and inaudible. Theres nothing funny about HIS attacks on Harris and the Democrats, and without that what do we have? A boring rambly mess that doesn't even make me angry at the democrats.
Overall an absolute fumble for Trump. His concept of a plan to win is less tangible than SV pre-ideation startups that strode into VC offices with a dream and a rejected application to Caltech.
Yeah, the campaign feels very online. The Haitian thing is incredibly specific and the sort of thing you think lands when you follow too many DR accounts.
It feels like in 2016 Trump was saying things that people felt but couldn't hear on cable news or the debate stage. Now it feels like he's digging up things a lot of the people who wanted that would see as the theories of online weirdos.
The Haitian question is a race between whether right wing researchers can dig up a case that gets close enough for plausibility before someone insane yelling about cats murders a Haitian or beats them up with a baseball bat or burns down a house full of migrants. A sort of stochastic terrorism roulette.
It's catchy, but dangerous.
That's actually optimistic. IMO it's just dangerous and the damage has already been done.
My take is that it doesn't matter if they pull up a case. It's already too late at this point.
Unless Trump went into the debate with multiple, verifiable (as in "caught in 4K video") cases it was always going to seem crazy and be easy to dismiss.
I think the idea that this is what gets John and Jane Q finally onboard is the sort of thing jaded internet people who've seen Democrats seemingly escape every single "immigrant t-bones/rapes/robs citizen" story thinks will finally land and cause the scales to fall from the eyes of the nation. It won't. It just looks weird to even bring up and people will recoil. If they don't Google it, see the first mainstream outlet and fuck off.
The truth is that Democrats in the real world (as opposed to online leftists who have a clear incentive to never cede an inch) aren't getting away with it; people are already dissatisfied with Democrats on immigration (which is why they tried to deal) and the polling indicates this is one of Trump's (or any Republican's) strongest issue and the one where he has the most credibility relative to his Democratic opponent.
It's just that Trump is unpopular enough (and has a flexible enough relationship with the truth) that it's still close. If it was anyone else you likely wouldn't need the dogs and cats thing in the first place. And it certainly would be more believable if Mitt Romney or Nikki Haley decided to sound the alarm.
I don’t think that’s true, because this is something that absolutely hits the sensibilities of the PMC who have been basically able to ignore the problem because it’s not affecting them. Pets are in many parts of the PMC class a very sensitive point. They don’t have to care about blue collar rednecks losing jobs to immigrants. They only have brief conversations with rednecks when they show up to fix the HVAC system or repair the roof or install a floor. But having an immigrant steal your beloved pet and eat it is something that the wine moms are going to be upset about. These are the same people who are trying to certify their pets as support animals so they can take them to Walmart. The idea of losing their pets in that way would be horrific.
If you grew up in the era when people still read newspapers or watched local news on TV (i.e. you were born before about 1990) then if-it-bleeds-it-leads media incentives meant that you were subject to intensive coverage of lurid crimes and a media narrative that crime is out of control. This narrative was completely unresponsive to the large drop in crime in the 1990's, with the result that low-information voters think that crime continued to increase, and use this fact to justify cocooning their kids. You could live somewhere as peaceful as the Zurich suburbs and still fill a local media crime blotter with sufficiently lurid stories that crime would be out of control in the minds of people who consume media crime coverage, and a crucial part of the education of a blue triber is understanding this.
Even if it was true, "One Haitian immigrant in one small town killed and ate their neighbours cat" being signal-boosted nationally by partisan media is exactly the sort of crime coverage that blue tribers have learned to tune out, and frankly that everyone should have learned to tune out.
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Still too optimistic.
And race isn't? Arguably it's the sensitive point. If it was refugees from Scotland you might have a shot.
Your mistake here is assuming people are going to treat this as a neutral rational argument and not a plate of political sewage; they will react with visceral disgust. 2rafa's post about how people react in Britain to bringing up uncomfortable immigration facts is how it'll actually go:
In the American case they'll simply refuse to even grant it unless it's absolutely unavoidable. And even then, you might get some of the "pigheaded 'what of it?' stubbornness" with the more left wing types.
There are some things people of good character and breeding just don't want to hear, let alone talk about in polite conversation. "Black savages are eating people's cats" (which is how it'll sound to them because, let's be real, that's what the DR is saying) is as close to the top of the list as I can imagine. You really need the 4K video. And something that hints it wasn't one deranged person.
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