Watching the debate tonight?

JoeMorgue said:
Oh I know. Hell if anything Vince McMahon is the only human being I could describe as "Trump-like" in a honest way that makes any sense.

Difference is McMahon runs a wrestling promotion so he's easier to tolerate as just an insane alpha-male wacko.
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He also is a much more successful businessman than Trump.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
Honestly, that's the one I'm looking forwards to.
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Me too. Will be good to have a discussion between two adults, not just an adult and a chimpanzee in a suit.

ponderingturtle said:
Cut his mike when it isn't his turn to speak.
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I hope they do, in part because it'll let Biden speak, in part because it'll force Trump to find some way to be even more childish to disrupt the discussion, and because it'll cause the trumpkins to go bananas because the moderator was biased and never muted Biden's mic :D .

Matthew Best said:
I had to go to bed after the first 20 minutes, so I didn't see the whole thing, but it seems like you guys must have watched a completely different debate, because I read this morning that "President Trump just turned in the greatest debate performance in presidential history, displaying a command of the facts and control of the conversation."

It must be true, it's from his own website.
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It must be sad to be such a failure you have to invent your own reality and write your own praise. If Trump wasn't such a despicable... creature, I'd sympathize.
 
Safe-Keeper said:
It must be sad to be such a failure you have to invent your own reality and write your own praise. If Trump wasn't such a despicable... creature, I'd sympathize.
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Many, many, many moons ago I read a line in a book that I have long since forgotten the title of and never been able to track back down.

"It's sicking how horrible of a person you've had to become to make me not feel sorry for you."

That line has jumped into my head more than once in regards to Trump.
 
Matthew Best said:
I had to go to bed after the first 20 minutes, so I didn't see the whole thing, but it seems like you guys must have watched a completely different debate, because I read this morning that "President Trump just turned in the greatest debate performance in presidential history, displaying a command of the facts and control of the conversation."

It must be true, it's from his own website.
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Well who are you going to believe, the President of the United States or your own lyin' eyes ;)
 
Again under the open secret that Trump's job was to turn the debate into, as CNN put it, "a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck" he's not wrong.

Trump was elected to troll and in that sense he is the most successful President ever.
 
Craig4 said:
Those were just his cuff links. I wear them sometimes with my nicer suits and dress shirts. Instead of buttons at the end of the sleeve at your wrists there are two button holes and you put the link through the hole in the cuff.
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It was probably the ornament from a rosary bracelet. He is known to wear them. In the videos, the suspicious thing in his sleeve isn't near the cuff.
 
I remember strongly disliking Bush, and yet, when it was was over, I found that more than anything, I just felt bad for the guy.

Trump is a miserable character, and probably, beneath it all, desperately afraid and unhappy. Yet I just can't bring myself to feel sorry for him. He's like one of those irredeemable bad guys in old action or superhero flicks, the kind of character who's just evil. Everything he does seems to be for his own gratification, or for some kind of gain, be it social, or financial, or diplomatic. Even when he does express sadness, it's always because he feels sorry for himself, never other people. There's just nothing good in him to relate to.
 
Scopedog said:
It was probably the ornament from a rosary bracelet. He is known to wear them. In the videos, the suspicious thing in his sleeve isn't near the cuff.
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Versions of the phrase “in the videos, the suspicious thing...” always provide the foundation of a well-reasoned argument.
 
I was amused when Trump, who paid someone to take his SAT for him got on Biden for going to the University of Delaware. If your base is non-college educated white males, deriding someone for the school they went to is rather an odd choice. The few Trump voters smart enough to pick up on it will understand that he thinks even less of them than he does Bidden because they didn't go to any university.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Again under the open secret that Trump's job was to turn the debate into, as CNN put it, "a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck" he's not wrong.

Trump was elected to troll and in that sense he is the most successful President ever.
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I think Joe is onto something here, although I don't know that he took it far enough.

What if Trump sat down with his campaign strategists before the debate and decided that at this point in the race, very few minds were going to change. Therefore, it's all about turnout. In that case, Trump wins if he can depress voter turnout.

If we assume that Trump's conscious goal was to get people to stay home on election day, everything he did makes sense.



It goes along with this story:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech...-suppression-black-americans-2016/3567588001/

For those who haven't seen it, it's about a leak of Trump's campaign data from 2016, showing that millions of Americans were targeted with "deterrence" ads. These were ads specifically aimed at depressing voter turnout among people who were more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. It was a conscious, deliberate, strategy on his part.

What if that circus* last night was also part of that strategy? If so, I'm sure it worked. I'm sure that the antics last night will keep people away from the polls, and in a pattern that means Biden loses more votes that way than Trump. Some of his comments, like bringing up "you just lost the far left" were clearly aimed at that tactic, but the entire performance would have had that effect.

In a strange way, I find this even more sickening than the overt voter suppression techniques that we have seen that use just barely legal, or even illegal, tactics to disenfranchise people. That's despicable, trying to prevent people from expressing their choice. However, this Trump campaign tactic is more aimed at the actual soul of the voters. It aims not to keep them down, but to convince them there is no point in getting up. It's very disturbing.

I hope the Biden team recognizes it, and is effective in countering it. If this tactic were to succeed, it would not merely mean that Trump would be president for another four years, it would mean that he was successful in sapping the spirit of the American people. That's a lot bigger deal than just four years of bad policies.



*Circus workers have expressed offense at this comparison.
 
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