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Are these really tactics when they hurt his own cause? If I shit in my own mouth because I am hungry, is this considered a tactic to stave off hunger?

It's still a tactic. Whether they're effective or not is irrelevant. There's a pretty clear playbook of him doing this for the last 4-5 years on Twitter.
The lengths people (you) will go to to defend his insanity and stupidity is truly remarkable. He's a loser. Why die on this hill?

I'm not defending him.
Uhhh...right.

Just because I'm not attacking him doesn't mean I'm defending him. His tweet, whether one is in support of it or not, is a clear pattern of his Twitter behavior the last 4+ years. Identifying that he uses a tactic like this is not an endorsement or defense of the content of the tweet. Effectiveness or agreeability isn't required for something to be a tactic. 3-2 to start the half versus Kansas was horrible but it's still a tactic.
 
Are these really tactics when they hurt his own cause? If I shit in my own mouth because I am hungry, is this considered a tactic to stave off hunger?

It's still a tactic. Whether they're effective or not is irrelevant. There's a pretty clear playbook of him doing this for the last 4-5 years on Twitter.
The lengths people (you) will go to to defend his insanity and stupidity is truly remarkable. He's a loser. Why die on this hill?

I'm not defending him.
Uhhh...right.

Just because I'm not attacking him doesn't mean I'm defending him. His tweet, whether one is in support of it or not, is a clear pattern of his Twitter behavior the last 4+ years. Identifying that he uses a tactic like this is not an endorsement or defense of the content of the tweet. Effectiveness or agreeability isn't required for something to be a tactic. 3-2 to start the half versus Kansas was horrible but it's still a tactic.
Why did you respond the way you did to my original post about him suggesting the election be delayed? What did hope to accomplish? What compelled you to say anything?
 
I strongly disagree with you guy's assessments that what Trump does is not strategic. You can go through every single one of his tweets and identify a clear purpose behind it. For example, he's been tweeting about mail-in fraud for months specifically to escalate to this moment.

And the left are enablers every time they laugh off his statements as "stupid" or say "he can't do that." He "can't do" a lot of things he's done already. How do you all think dictatorships happen? Laws and documents like the Constitution only have power insofar as there are governing bodies willing and able to enforce them. Dictatorships happen through dismantling checks and balances from within. Appointing Barr to the DOJ was a step. Sending unidentified soldiers into the cities of his political enemies was a step too. That's also not something he "can do" and yet somehow no judge has stopped it.
 
The biggest strategic misstep here is that canceling the election is unnecessary. It will be stolen anyway -- through a combination of voter suppression, election fraud, and foreign interference. It doesn't matter how much Biden is ahead. The electoral college makes it so that it only takes 10,000 votes here and there in the right states.
 
I strongly disagree with you guy's assessments that what Trump does is not strategic

I agree that it's strategic, I just disagree that it's in any way Trump's idea to do it. I believe he's just the gaudy sock puppet doing what people like Stephen Miller tell him he should do.

And the left are enablers every time they laugh off his statements as "stupid" or say "he can't do that." He "can't do" a lot of things he's done already. How do you all think dictatorships happen? Laws and documents like the Constitution only have power insofar as there are governing bodies willing and able to enforce them.

Yes. And to go even further, our entire system of Constitutional democracy is not much more than a gentleman's agreement that we have rules and players will abide by them. As long as the military goes along with whatever the Commander in Chief directs them to do, there's really no way to stop him if he decides the rules aren't for him.
 
I guess we will see in a few months whether Trump has strategically, tactically and successfully instilled a dictatorship in America or not. If he has delivered two branches of government to Democrats after the minimum possible term, while nominating relatively moderate Justices to the third branch, he will have arguably been the most damaging President to his own party in history from a strategic perspective, as opposed to being a dictator who maintains complete control over a country. This might be the last opportunity for the Democrats to have control of the Senate and add liberal territories as states, and this was the kind of Republican President necessary to give them a chance at it. It might turn out to be more credible for liberals to revere and celebrate him as a mole for the Democrats, rather than hold him up as a political genius on par with Hitler, in the event a President Biden adds 3 states and 6 Democratic Senators by 2022.

If he wins, or find some other way to lengthen his term, then the “savant Trump” theory will have been proven to be correct, just as many people believed in retrospect when he won in 2016. The other side of the 2016 argument is that he basically lucked into it with an empirically strong entry position (8-year President on the other side), a historically disliked candidate on the other side who had defeated a primary challenger whose base mixed significantly with Trump’s base, and very close wins in swing states despite a popular vote loss.

I will certainly give credit where credit is due to the savant Trump side if he wins again, in spite of historically bad economics and health for 90% of America. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, you can’t fool me again.
 


Can't help but see all the Latinos making millions in MLB (plus Camila Cabello) and be skeptical of whether They have any legitimate beef with their treatment in America as well.
 
I guess we will see in a few months whether Trump has strategically, tactically and successfully instilled a dictatorship in America or not. If he has delivered two branches of government to Democrats after the minimum possible term, while nominating relatively moderate Justices to the third branch, he will have arguably been the most damaging President to his own party in history from a strategic perspective, as opposed to being a dictator who maintains complete control over a country. This might be the last opportunity for the Democrats to have control of the Senate and add liberal territories as states, and this was the kind of Republican President necessary to give them a chance at it. It might turn out to be more credible for liberals to revere and celebrate him as a mole for the Democrats, rather than hold him up as a political genius on par with Hitler, in the event a President Biden adds 3 states and 6 Democratic Senators by 2022.

If he wins, or find some other way to lengthen his term, then the “savant Trump” theory will have been proven to be correct, just as many people believed in retrospect when he won in 2016. The other side of the 2016 argument is that he basically lucked into it with an empirically strong entry position (8-year President on the other side), a historically disliked candidate on the other side who had defeated a primary challenger whose base mixed significantly with Trump’s base, and very close wins in swing states despite a popular vote loss.

I will certainly give credit where credit is due to the savant Trump side if he wins again, in spite of historically bad economics and health for 90% of America. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, you can’t fool me again.
That he's roundly hated and has strengthened the Democrats' position is sort of irrelevant to my argument here. So is the economic disaster and the health crisis. The goal of a dictator is not to be liked or to run a country successfully. The goal is to increase his own power and that of his cronies.

Where Trump is a "savant" is his skill at manipulation. He just have to get enough people to go along with him that the other side can't stop him.
 
I strongly disagree with you guy's assessments that what Trump does is not strategic

I agree that it's strategic, I just disagree that it's in any way Trump's idea to do it. I believe he's just the gaudy sock puppet doing what people like Stephen Miller tell him he should do.

And the left are enablers every time they laugh off his statements as "stupid" or say "he can't do that." He "can't do" a lot of things he's done already. How do you all think dictatorships happen? Laws and documents like the Constitution only have power insofar as there are governing bodies willing and able to enforce them.

Yes. And to go even further, our entire system of Constitutional democracy is not much more than a gentleman's agreement that we have rules and players will abide by them. As long as the military goes along with whatever the Commander in Chief directs them to do, there's really no way to stop him if he decides the rules aren't for him.
I believe him to be a master manipulator. I agree that he knows nothing about policy (or anything else, really). But I think his tweets are all him and show an instinctive understanding of what buttons to push with which people.

He stumbles sometimes, and we laugh at him. But the thing is that it doesn't matter. He's already established what you might call the "Dictator Clause": "If anyone disagrees with me, it's only because they're trying to bring me down; and if anyone makes any accusations against me, they're fake news."

This move is rhetorically impenetrable. It essentially secured his base no matter what his actions.
 
I think we are talking about different things. I don't think it makes him a political savant or master manipulator to secure 35% of the voting population 100% behind him and turn 50% of the voting population 100% against him. That isn't a sound strategy to turn a non-dictatorship into a dictatorship. To your point about manipulation skill leve, it is impressive how far manipulated those 35% of Americans are at this point, but unless more like 45% of America becomes functionally retarded, we are not really that close to the fringe of dictatorship.
 
His base is comprised of retards and racists.

When you’re preaching to the choir, is manipulation even needed?

There's a very good reason why a large percentage of his base are evangelicals, anti-vaxxers, and people who believe every internet conspiracy theory they're exposed to (QAnon and Pizzagate, for example).
 
When I tell lies, I like to keep them somewhere close to the truth, for simplicity's sake. Much respect to Kayleigh for being entirely untethered by such restraints.

 
IIRC Elections are pretty much run at the state level, there's really very little he could do even if he had institutional support from law enforcement on this.

It would pretty much take the coordination of a bunch of state legislatures, governors, secretaries of states. "Realistically", he'd have to arrange with at least a dozen of them a coordinated effort to send present-voting or abstaining delegates to the electoral college, which would be rife with administrative challenges and legal red tape, and just hope to keep any candidate from getting to 270, at which point it goes to the House of Reps where he could win with the vote of states. Essentially a coup-d'etat accomplished with the most generous description being a legal gray area.

Considering this admin has had trouble doing their paperwork on the most basic of tasks, I don't see that as possible.



I didn't realize the divide was that stark. I swear i'd read some Trump is being dumb by attacking mail-in voting because old republican voters use it just as much type of article, but clearly there is a large division here.

Emerson has Biden by +4 (50 vs 46), so if you extrapolate that information, it would indicate polling thinks that ~58% of voters will vote in-person, and ~42% by mail. I don't know the numbers from previous elections, but I imagine that has to be a record by a substantial amount. And when the mail-in ballots, dependent on USPS I imagine, are so skewed towards one candidate -- the candidate who isn't in charge of the federal government, which runs the post office obviously -- it obviously creates a huge vector of attack that potentially sidesteps the state-level process (see post above) of election handling, and though I don't think Trump would act upon it, or even has the capability of doing so, creates a potential motivation to do so at least. Ironically it would also create a motivation for swing state Dem SOSs to suppress and limit in-person voting

At the very least, it's easy to imagine a scenario -- probably the likely scenario -- where Trump is easily up on election night and perhaps for a week(s) after.

Not to mention, there are plenty of consequences that could result without being directed by any group in particular:

If even 10% of mail-in ballots were randomly unable to be processed and somehow lost/disregarded because of the massive load (not due to malevolence, just industrial stress), that would result in a national popular vote win by 1.2 points -- and an easy electoral college win -- for Trump, despite a true Biden +4 margin. Even just a 5% error rate on ballots would result in Biden +1.6, less than the national popular margin vote in 2016 that Hillary got, and thus another likely GOP electoral college win.
 
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