Is the Daily News owner by the Murdoch’s now? It’s nothing but RWNJ-adjacent stories in my feed now for like the past two months. Even articles critical of Trump swipe the left a la Glemfeld
“Donald Trump’s town hall with ABC News did not go well, although I give him credit for agreeing to a road game in a hostile gym.”
Apparently a room full of voters, many Trump supporters, is now a hostile gym for Trump. Republicans truly live in a bubble.
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I think it showed he’s going to get rekt in the debate if Biden is anywhere near competent, dude just doesn’t have any answers for anything at this point.
Yeah, like this debate is going to go very differently for him than the last one because he’s not going to be able to avoid talking about his record. I hope Biden keeps things simple and is like “everything is shit now, that’s on you” and when Trump starts going “CHINA VIRUS, DEMOCRAT CITIES” say “yeah you were always willing to take credit when the stock market was hitting highs, or when jobs numbers were good, but as soon as anything is wrong it’s always someone else’s fault. America will always face challenges, coping with them is the goddamn job of the President, you’ve failed at it”. I don’t think you want to get into the nitty-gritty of “you failed to do X, Y and Z in response to the pandemic” because Trump will just straight up lie and you can’t be like Clinton and be all “GO TO JOE BIDEN THREE OH THREE OH SLASH FACTCHECK” because nobody cares. In a world with no shared set of facts to draw on, you just have to be like “scoreboard dude, everything sucks, that’s on you”. Like sure get into the Woodward stuff and demonstrate that he lied but don’t get into details.
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Joe has been really strong lately. I watched him take questions today and he was legitimately fantastic. As long as he doesn’t get into the weeds or do the stupid ass GO TO NOMULARKEY.COM TO FACT CHECK, he will objectively crush the debates. That said, I don’t think they matter for him - they’re basically a Trump freeroll because his absurdity is baked in but any Joe missteps will lead the news cycle.
This has to be the overriding organizing principle here.
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I agree with the free roll problem, but I think Joe will do well. I think he struggled in the big clown car format debates because it is harder to find your rhythm when there is lots of crosstalk and everyone is angling for more screentime. Plus, I really do believe that a huge % of the reason why Biden is running is precisely because he wanted a shot at Trump. He’ll be loaded for bear in a way that he wasn’t when he was going after his primary opponents. I think the key, as one of the Pod Save Bros said recently, is to not just be mad at Trump, but to be indignant on behalf of the American people.
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Showerthought: If Biden can, at some point in the campaign he should ask Trump if there’s anything he thought he personally failed at or could have done better at in his term. That’s a softball question for most people, you just say like “well I wish I could have done [awesome and popular thing X] a bit quicker” or whatever, but Trump’s platinum-level narcissism makes him functionally incapable of saying anything other than that he did the greatest job anyone could have done, and in any case he doesn’t do anything but watch TV and try to spin things, his failures are generally via inaction so they’re hard to spin positively. I think looking around at the state of America, “I actually did an incredible job” is going to be tough to swallow for anyone who isn’t a hardcore cultist. This plays into the general narrative that you want to push about Trump, which is that he’s a bullshit artist, then you can move on to the Woodward stuff etc.
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I don’t think this will work with a narcissist. He’ll instinctively access his “blame others” and self pity wells, which run very deep. “I tell you what, I wish I had not trusted all those backstabbing losers like Felon Michael Cohen and Traitor Rex Tillerson. Those people failed me, they failed you, and now the Do Nothing Democrats and Fake News and Antifa Terrorists are treating me so unfairly. So unfairly.”
Engaging Trump directly is a losing game. You’re just handing him the mike.
I dunno I don’t think that’s going to fly. It seems like that works because he does it all the time in front of reporters, who are bound by journalistic integrity or whatever not to go on the attack and say things like “Truman had a sign on his desk saying ‘the buck stops here’, when you took office you said you were going to ‘hire the best people’, and all those people you just listed were appointed or employed BY YOU. You’re the President of the United States, are you ever going to take responsibility for anything? If you’re not capable of putting together an effective team, make way in the Oval Office for someone who can”.
They have weeks to prep this shit, they can be like “you’ve been through 4 attorney generals, 3 sec states, 4 chiefs of staff, 5 press secretaries” or whatever the numbers are “these were all people appointed by you, how many more people do you have to appoint and then accuse of being incompetent before it becomes clear where the problem is here?”. Biden could go the route of saying “you said you were going to run the country like a business” and then list like 10 major CEOs who stepped down when their businesses weren’t going well. “They realised that the buck stops at the top, you’re the President, it’s your job to make it work”.
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I agree this line of debate makes Trump look bad, I just worry that it mostly appeals to people who are already on Biden’s side and are watching the debate to see him stick it to Trump. That’s fine as far as it goes, but does it really help with election? I always come back to breaking down the audience for these things into the logical groupings:
DD - will vote and will vote D
D - may vote and will vote D if vote
X - may vote and could vote for either party
R - may vote and will vote R if vote
RR - will vote and will vote R
My assumption is that the debate strategy you lay out appeals too much to DD, which achieves nothing electorally. Having said that, it may appeal somewhat to X, although I suspect that X is not very large in such a polarized political environment.
D is huge because it contains disenfranchised young people (and others).
What do you think? I may be wrong about the sizes of D and X, and I may be wrong about the appeal of your suggested debate approach to different groups.
X should really be “M” for moron because anyone who is actually undecided at this point is such a galactic moron your only hope is to whirl pretty colours in front of them in hopes it distracts them enough to accidentally vote correctly.
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X actually has two subgroups - people that definitely will vote and people that may vote. The “may vote / either party” is much bigger because most people engaged in the process have picked a side.
I am somewhat sympathetic to people with much less money than me that are just working insanely hard just to keep their heads above water. We should recognize that it is a privilege to be as engaged as we are on this stuff. And this kind of thing goes straight to my argument that Dems need to pitch “We Will Help You” directly to these people and stop market testing messaging with inside the beltway types. These people haven’t made up their minds in part because Dems aren’t reaching them.
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I’m not advocating this to the exclusion of talking about policy, but at some point you clearly have to try to tie Trump to the state of the country at the moment. How else do you do that? We know what doesn’t work (detailed exchanges about questions of fact, scolding him for various immoralities, pointing out that he’s thick, “Dangerous Donald”, etc etc). The most surprising thing in political polling recently was that Trump got bad marks for his handling of the George Floyd protests. I think what people are responding to there is that sense of a lack of leadership. So that’s the soft spot, that’s what you go for.
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This is a really good post, thanks, I totally see where you’re coming from.
My concern is that Trump, and malignant narcissists generally, are highly skilled at dragging people down to their level and deflecting and lying and placing blame. I know its hard to think of Trump as being “good” at anything but its an ingrained behavior pattern and it works well against people with good intentions. Biden really has to approach direct interactions with Trump as a trap that he has to avoid stepping in. He’s certainly not going to get any help from moderators, they’re all from the journalism school that refuses to learn.
But your broader point is totally correct, Biden can and should accuse Trump of failure and just not caring. If there’s one thing Biden is still really good at it is giving the impression of compassion. Trump can’t even fake it.
From the article:
Here is what Trump said in full:
"Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus – you know that right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes.
One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in.” It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax."
This one drives me insane. He does call it a hoax. Russia was a hoax. Impeachment was a hoax. This is their new hoax. HOW IS THAT NOT CALLING IT A HOAX.
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Best headline of all time.
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But he didn’t actually say the exact words “Covid-19 is a hoax”, so Biden should be accused of lying. I am a very smart journalist.
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