I think he was trying to say something like this, âIâm going to tax imported goods, and with the revenue we will subsidize childcare for hard working Americans, and the revenue will be so high that we will do so many more things to make America great againâŚâ
Itâs bollocks and empty, and not thought through, but he couldnât even deliver that. I donât even think he knows what childcare is. He understands nothing of the circumstances of how people live.
As far as the upcoming debate is concerned , I think if Harris can just ignore his provocations and interruptions ( we wonât be able to hear them but she will) , and if the questions are policy based then she should just stick to answering them in an expansive and authorative way. Then let people compare that with the type of bullshit and bloviation that is Trumpâs stock in trade. He literally knows nothing about anything policy related , and itâs almost embarrassing to witness. Even when reading from a teleprompter itâs obvious that heâs reading it for the first time and that it just doesnât interest him. Hopefully the moderators might attempt to pin him down to some specifics when he starts to âweaveâ , but I wouldnât expect too much from them. The deference that this clown is afforded is nauseating.
The problem with the debates is they are pretty much a Rorschach test and for most people whatever you think you were going to see going in there will be a way to find evidence of that from the performances, and I think that has never been more true than when Trump is involved.
Hillaryâs âa man you can bait with a tweet is not a person who can be trusted with the nuclear codesâ is about as close to a KO blow as you can land in these things. People from her campaign have spoken about how when she walked off stage after that debate they thought it was over, that she had succeeded in publicly undressing him as the unqualified buffoon that he is. They then woke up to âTrump does better than expectedâ, and âClinton came across as over prepared and too knowledgeableâ treatments from the press.
I am confident that Harris will manage him handily and Trump will further expose himself. I am not confident that it will mean anything.
More on the debate , along with some eye-watering statistics like these ;
"Of the roughly 325,000 airings of television ads that Mr. Trump, Ms. Harris and their leading super PAC allies have paid for since she entered the race, about 95 percent of them have focused on her.
Of the 84,937 ads that the Trump campaign has broadcast from the time Ms. Harris emerged as a candidate through midweek, all but 189 have featured Ms. Harris prominently, according to the AdImpact data. More than 90 percent of the ads that Ms. Harris has run, meanwhile, have focused heavily on her biography, her agenda or both. The leading pro-Harris super PAC, Future Forward, has not run any purely anti-Trump ads since she began running."
Not even remotely surprising. Trump has thoroughly defined himself. Very few people have a neutral reaction to him. Harris is more of an unknown, so both campaigns have focused on trying to define her.
The critical caveat to this is there are people voting in this election who were as young as 9 when Trump first came down the gold escalator and spoke of Mexico not sending their best people.
It is probably not reasonable to think that 18 year old Trump curious men are going to be directly swayed by reading critical coverage of Trump in the NYT, but for as fragmented as our information system is these days it is still interconnected. The tone and volume of coverage of the high profile outlets does trickle down, even if only in vibes. There are people voting in this election who Trump is making a big push to land who only know Trump as a legitimate political figure because so much of the coverage of him has the view âwe said he was absurd in summer 2016 and the party didnât listen, so it doesnât make sense to ever cover him like that againâ.
To this point, it not only that they fail to cover him as a shit for brains, their attempts to find a throughline in his insane ramblings forces them to craft a somehow coherent idea that simply was not there in the message and then by presenting that give it political validation.
Contrast the response of the woman who asked Trump the childcare question vs how the AP reported his response
The term many are using to describe this is âsane washingâ. It doesnât just fail to present him as the imbecile he is, but it gives a pretense that there is validity to these ideas. This is how you end up with Trump claiming he will oversee the removal of over 20m people from the country (with no details for how he will accomplish this) being presented as a strategy for addressing the housing crisis.
Never ceases to maze me that almost all Americans havenât woken up to this raving,incomprehensible lunatic who should be in a nut house.
The same guy who a few years ago contemplated nuking a fucking hurricane,makes cosying up to Putin,and describing Covid as âjustâa little flu,how many Americans did that kill?seem like simple stuff.
The fact that anyone would want him anywhere near the White House beggars belief.