Is Trump a "mad aberration" or is he "rewiring the game in some permanent way"? "Watching that depressing debate, one must conclude that the rewiring is well underway."

Writes Maureen Dowd (NYT).
It’s a paradox wrapped in an oxymoron about a moron: Trump’s faux-thenticity somehow makes the Democratic candidates seem more packaged, more stuck in politician-speak.

In speeches and at rallies, Trump kicks over the traces, saying what’s on his mind, even though it often doesn’t mesh with reality, even though it lacks dignity and can be ugly and hateful....
At this point, the column is festooned with amusing quotes from a Trump rally that happened at the same time as the Democrats' last debate. Sample:
He mocked the Green New Deal, saying: “That’s a beauty. No more cows. No more planes. I guess no more people, right?” Then he teased Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader: “Because Kevin is just like a cow. He’s just smaller.”
"But how to counter this?" — Dowd asks. She wrote "the rewiring is well underway," but she didn't find that any of the Democrats had rewired. It's more that we are rewired and so we perceive them in a different way. We find them "depressing...  more packaged, more stuck in politician-speak."
The three hours seemed endless, with two questions hanging over the night: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” and “Will the most beatable candidate in American history win twice?”
I'd say you're not "rewired" until you see why Trump is hard to beat.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“2020 Democratic candidate Sen. Kamala Harris asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a Tuesday letter to consider suspending President Trump's account...”

“... for violating its user agreement with his tweets about the Ukraine whistleblower and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).... Harris accused Trump of violating Twitter's rule that users ‘may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people’ by falsely accusing the Ukraine whistleblower of ‘spying’ and Schiff of treason. The California senator called the tweets ‘blatant threats’ ...” Axios reports. It’s helpful to know that Harris’s orientation is to suppress freedom of speech. Her own political speech has proven quite ineffectual, so it’s in her self-interest to shut down the speech of others. Whether she’s into restricting speech for personal reasons or whether she pure-heartedly seeks the greater good through censorship, it’s a bad orientation to display as you’re running for President. I’m certainly glad she has the freedom of speech to express that lousy thinking, though. What she’s said puts her out of the running for my vote. (And, yes, I know Twitter is a
Read more

“According to an excerpt, the president privately suggested to aides that soldiers shoot migrants in the legs, but he was told it would be illegal.”

BBC reports on the book, “Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration” (written by NYT reporters and published by the NYT): Mr Trump suggested other extreme measures, according to the book. "Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh," reads the extract. Assuming — only for the sake of argument —  that the unnamed interviewees got these facts right, I would still need to have a feeling for the kind of brainstorming that was going on. This could have been lightweight banter or some way of getting to useful ideas by first loosening up and just saying every crazy thing you could think of, as if you were pitching movie ideas. Trump might have talked about a snake pit or an alligator moat, but how did he talk about it? Context is everything here, the
Read more