As far as the upcoming debate is concerned , I think if Harris can just ignore his provocations and interruptions ( we won’t 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 Trump’s stock in trade. He literally knows nothing about anything policy related , and it’s almost embarrassing to witness. Even when reading from a teleprompter it’s obvious that he’s reading it for the first time and that it just doesn’t interest him. Hopefully the moderators might attempt to pin him down to some specifics when he starts to ‘weave’ , but I wouldn’t 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.
Hillary’s “a man you can bait with a tweet is not a person who can be trusted with the nuclear codes” 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 “Trump does better than expected”, and “Clinton came across as over prepared and too knowledgeable” 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."
(Free to read.)
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.
“She’s not that prick.”
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 “we said he was absurd in summer 2016 and the party didn’t listen, so it doesn’t make sense to ever cover him like that again”.
Fixed
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
https://x.com/reshmasaujani/status/1831869410359046642
The term many are using to describe this is “sane washing”. It doesn’t 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.
@PeachesEnRegalia , SBYM just praised you.
Haha @SBYM
Looks like it’s going to be a loooooong weekend…
Sigh…
Shelve it, twats.
No worries.
Second or third knuckle?
You already know the answer.
Never ceases to maze me that almost all Americans haven’t 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 “just”a 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.
I wonder how many daft “leftists” will now refuse to vote for Harris, claiming she’s just cosying up to the right.
I absolutely detest tribalism in politics. Vote your values not your labels.
They probably think it is values. It’s my way or the highway.
I think what gets me is those people that think if they can’t have their own personal utopia then they will vote for the literal opposite.
There will be a loud SM argument about this but I think you have to question how many of those involved in it were likely to vote in the first place.
While it invites “no true Scotsman” arguments in response, one of the under rated stories of this cycle has been the incredible pragmatism of the leaders on the left to get done what they can when they cannot have everything they want. AoC’s take down the other day of people backing Jill Stein was just a pitch perfect argument for the responsibility progressives have to work in a way that actually gets shit done.
The DNC will be flying a banner over the Big House (Michigan) today reminding fans that JD Vance supports Ohio State 
Does the absurdity of promising defense of [their interpretation of] the second amendment while hiding behind protective glass need any further comment?