Everyone's campaign strategy against Donald Trump appears to have converged on the same tactic: trolling. It's all about deliberately hurling insults at him in the hope that he'll melt down completely and eventually lose the plot.
Neither Nikki Haley nor Joe Biden are even trying to hide this. They're all but daring Trump to maintain his composure, confident that he can't do it even when he knows he's being baited.
Do you think it will work? I do.
They really need to mention the $83 million settlement for rape before every comment.
"My opponent, who owes $83 million because he's a rapist, says we should replace the ACA. I disagree with Donnie Rapist."
...or just lead with, "I don't think you should trust a rapist with your children's future, do you?"
'...the disgraced molester and loser of the 2020 election...'
Exactly. A sane society would've been doing this for six years.
I kind of like "My opponent, who pays porn stars to sleep with him,..."
It's $88.3 million now, isn't it? I assume he hasn't yet paid up for his first round of insults, which were part of his "presidential duties" -- along with calling in to Fox Newz every day?
Apparently he has! Well, in part. He had to post FIVE MILLION DOLLARS to the courts in order to appeal the first case. And he'll have to guarantee EIGHTY-THREE MILLION DOLLARS to appeal the second. Send in your contributions NOW!!! The poor dear.
Well, I don't know that the purpose of the insults and trolling is to get him to lose his composure. He's never had any, and his followers don't care whether he acts dignified.
No, the purpose of the trolling is to highlight his very real weaknesses and faults. It only appears insulting because those faults are so bad.
And yeah, I expect this will work better than droning on about interest rates or deficits or what have you. If nothing else, it gives lazy and stupid reporters something to work with.
"... and his followers don't care whether he acts dignified."
It is not about his followers. It is the undecided voters that will decide the elections, and convincing them them that he is unhinged would certainly be useful.
That is not in any way true - Trump long was quite in control of himself - a vulgarian but perfectly in control of himself relative to his manipulative goals.
For the cultural Left professional class of course he's never had an attractive comportment, he's always been a vulgarian, but that is not the same as not having control.
The behaviours in view recently as like with the trial are not the same as historical. He clearly loses the plot and no longer maintains the same manipulative façade.
Your response is the lens of the people who already dislike him - talking to yourselves. Haley and Biden rather seem to understand it is the wider audiences fro hom simple vulgarianism is not sufficient, rather instability and incoherence brought out....
Other than the swipe at "the cultural left professional class" I agree. He had very good control when he was young. When he had the TV show? Not sure. There's all those NDAs, how could we know?
Stories from the apprentice say he'd screw up all the time and then they'd have re-cut the episode so it looked like the "winner" actually did well.
The degree of harm done by Mark Burnett's refusal to release any of the out-takes from that show is just beyond all calculation. Makes me wonder what the devil trump has on him. Or else he's a true believer, which would be even worse.
"He says what we think" has always been what appeals to his voters. Now, whether this was a brilliant deliberate pose as you seem to think, or just him expressing the same inchoate rage as them against the same groups they hate, which I think is closer to the truth, makes little difference here. The point is I'm not sure how they're going to tell the difference between Trump cleverly manipulating his audience and him lashing out blindly. The lashing out has always been there and doesn't depend on him being bated.
Still, I approve of the trolling anyway as over time it may inform low-information voters about whom they're voting for.
Hey Lounsbury it wasn't just the cultural Left professional class that hated Trump. My dear sweet Grandma who only went to school through the 8th grade born in 1906, lived in Brooklyn, NY and later near Newark, NJ hated trump as most folks local to NYC in the 1970s and 1980s did - he had a crummy reputation in his own hometown.
Yep. Every New Yorker has always known that he’s a sexist, bigoted shitbag.
Of course, since a lot of folks are sexist, bigoted shitbags, they love a guy who proudly says that’s okay.
Right, but being sexist and bigoted is not the same as "losing it".
It worked for Jean Carroll. I do hope Biden refers to him as a rapist
Hey, Trump!
Funeral parlor called they changed your glow up appointment to Monday.
To really bait him they need to say he is weak and a coward.
Haley can certainly say that because he declines to debate with her. She probably doesn't because she is worried about her (and her family) safety.
Haley should start to calling him "Donald rabbit" until he agrees to debate.
I recall saying back during the 2020 cycle that what we needed were sacrificial (verbal) pugilists who would allow everyone to see Trump's meltdowns.
To pay for his crimes and legal bills Trump should start a GoFundMe, because he's a pitiful helpless giant rapist.
They really need to mention the $83 million settlement for rape before every comment.
"My opponent, who owes $83 million because he's a rapist, says we should replace the ACA. I disagree with Donnie Rapist."
====================================================
Trump's not a rapist, neither is Biden.
Both are vulnerable here: remember Tara Reade, that other false/mistaken accuser?
E. Jean is, of course, TRump's false accuser.
It used to be, you had to actually prove (have evidence) of rape. Now it's mostly: "oh, I remember" and "I told someone at the time...."
It's like you're living in a can at the bottom of a very deep hole.
Yeah, we used to handle rape so much better in this country.
My god man.
I suppose it doesn't matter than in his so-called defense, Donnie lied constantly.
Tara Reade seems to be the result of the right wing conviction that making rape accusations is easy. Periodically it seems the right finds someone to make such an accusation only to have it completely fall apart because it isn't easy to get actual rapes taken seriously. And yet people on the right never learn from this that rape accusations are hard to get taken seriously, instead they just reinforce their sense of paranoia that their accusations fall apart.
Of course Carroll's case was helped in that her statements were balanced against a known liar who had bragged about doing exactly what Carroll accused him of, and couldn't even get himself to say that powerful people molesting weaker people is a bad thing. Had Trump not bragged against getting to grab women without asking, your comment would likely not look so bad, in fact it would likely be unnecessary since Carroll likely wouldn't have come forward.
But presumably you know that of Biden and Trump only one of them was found be a jury to be liable for rape by a preponderance of evidence.
Trump has bragged a bunch of times about sexual assault and is a known habitual liar, and we're supposed to believe Carroll is the liar here?
Yeah, no.
You're getting boringly repetitive about the lack of evidence. Carroll testified under oath; that's evidence. Whether or not it is sufficient evidence was the jury's call, and they decided it is.
Except that a jury DID find that Trump is a rapist. Granted it was in a civil trial rather than criminal so it was only by a preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. Good luck spinning that one. “It’s only more likely than not that he raped her, not certain.”
Trump denies sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll in the same way he denies having an affair with Karen McDougal and a hook up with Stormy Daniels. Everyone knows he did it but his fans like the idea and his religious enablers get to pretend he didn’t do it. His fans probably figure she did it willingly. But it makes him “strong” in their eyes. That’s why I think mentioning rape won’t really make him come unhinged. What does hurt him is any sign of weakness. This is why he was so annoyed with the “small hands” accusation. That’s why I think the stinky diaper thing would bother him. His showing in New Hampshire didn’t give him that “strong unbeatable” look he wanted and Haley’s failure to drop out thus really bothered him.
The cognitive decline thing bothered him during his presidency and that’s why he took that test and why he acts like it proved he isn’t in cognitive decline and why he continues to mention it. Trump performatively taking his mask off on the balcony of the White House after his Covid hospitalization was a part of this. Trump’s audience wants a “strong man” and Trump knows his audience.
Sure, he's a rapist! He just got off from that particular label on a technicality: he didn't do it with his nasty bits. Just his little bitty fingers.
A jury found that Donald Trump shoved his fingers into the vagina of a woman against her will.
We call that “rape.”
No one, let alone a jury, has ever, ever found that Joe Biden did anything remotely similar.
And Ms. Reade is in Russia.
This is a nation of laws. Right-wingers hate that—and are trying to destroy it—but it’s still true.
If you’ve got something to prove, then prove it. As E. Jean Carroll did.
Trolling? It seems to me, on the contrary, that everyone in the GOP is tiptoeing around Trump. The only thing that bothered him was that DeSantis and Haley were running against him at all.
i haven't been paying attention to what the haley or biden campaigns have been up to. how are they trolling him?
What I saw was some tweets. One was after a Trump speech and Biden said “It’s simple, folks. Do you want four more years of that? If you don’t, pitch in to our campaign”. Then there was another in which Biden exhorted Trump to “Be Best”.
Trolling tends to divide people.
They should have been mocking him a decade ago, we could have avoided a lot of unpleasantness.
That's how you destroy authoritarians. Their insecurity is their kryptonite. You mock them and make them small, and then they are. Because they always were sad little shitheads all along.
Obama was mocking him in 2011, and he was so livid he ran for president once he didn’t have to face Obama directly.
I mean, I take your point, but it would have taken a campaign of mockery instead of a single drone attack.
Thank you for bringing this up--the very funny, very regrettable White House Correspondents' Dinner in which Obama poked fun at DJT. It was gentle fun, and yet his response was to run for president. Shaming him, embarrassing him, emboldens him and his ardent followers.
I agree, he used to be publicly more in control of himself, but that was before he put himself in one of the world's most scrutinized jobs, did a lot of entitled BS things, and attracted the hairy eyeball and slow grinding attention of the law, which he's always been phobic about. It's put him in a new place. He's never been under this degree and kind of pressure, and some sort of crack-up seems more likely than not to me. He's already getting far more personally abusive about Haley and other opponents, and that's a likely track for him to widen and deepen.
Satire, which is also needed, is about affecting the public's view of him. Trolling is partly satire but it's also about getting a reaction from him, and it's worked before. He could have lived out his remaining days as a celebrity, a locally-tolerated flamboyant figure, an all-around gasbag without real legal exposure, but no, he let Obama's needling of him at the Correspondents' Dinner get under his skin. He always had big political ideas but that's what pushed him over the edge and into the presidency he didn't really want.
Since 2020 the picadors at the Lincoln Project have been continually jabbing him, mostly in ways the public doesn't see so much but that register with him. And he's upping his abusiveness about them.
And now Haley. She's everything he despises and detests and she's saying all kinds of things about him "that are illegal blah blah blah" as if he really knows what the law is. More power to her, and to the Biden campaign people, for chipping away at what remains of his ability to stop himself from offending just about everybody who isn't attached to his backside.
That Christie hot-mic moment seems to have really lit a fire under her.
Reminds me of Manafort. His friends warned him not to be Trump's campaign manager. Too much scrutiny.
If you do a bunch of criming you want to keep a low profile.
This is absolutely the right tack to be taking with Trump.
This entire year should be fear, fear, and more fear.
I'm reminded strongly of Harry Reid's 2012 Senate campaign. He was regarded as very vulnerable; polling was dismal, his personal popularity in Nevada was at an all-time low, etc.
But his opponent was Sharon Angle, genuine loon.
His campaign took stock of things and decided "people don't usually conceive of elections as a weighted contest between options; they usually conceive of it as 'Do I want X to win?' and if the answer is yes, vote for X; if the answer is no, vote for the other guy. If Nevadans go to the polls thinking 'Do I want Harry Reid to be my Senator?' we're going to get clobbered. If they go to the polls thinking 'Do I want Sharon Angle to be my Senator?' we have a shot."
Operating on that logic, they spent the entire campaign going full scorched on Angle. They made the minimum attempts you have to do to sell yourself; Reid had a platform and could intelligently discuss policy, of course. But every single moment of every day they could manage it, it was 'look at how crazy and evil and crazy evil Sharon Angle is. Do you want THAT?'
And it worked. Reid eeked out a narrow victory; a shade over 50% to Angle's 46%, with significant third-party defection on the right.
That's gotta be Biden's game plan re: Trump. If people are thinking "Do I want Grampa Joe to be President?" he probably loses badly. If they're thinking "Do I want Donald Trump, treasonous rapist, to be President?" he probably wins strongly.
So full scorched earth. Dobbs, treason, Dobbs, rape, Dobbs, and more Dobbs.
Trolling would certainly come at the cost of a certain amount of dignity lost to office holders and to the offices themselves.
The man I felt would have been kryptonite to Trump is Al Franken.
Calling him weak and a coward (for declining to debate Haley) would be a very good baiting, and will not lose dignity for anyone.
I’m not sure how your comment relates to what I wrote.
You wrote that trolling cause lose of dignity. Calling him (Trump) "weak and a coward" wouldn't lose dignity.
Maybe you think "weak" and "a coward" will not count as trolling?
No, not at all, at least not necessarily. I think that baiting Trump could work well. But trolling is something lower than mere baiting, and I’d rather not see politicians of every stripe feel the need to become trolls.
Yes1
Hey Donnie! I hear you're jealous that your "son" Barron is taller than you! Ha ha ha - he's not your son!
Somewhat OT: an NPR report tonight on book-banning in Texas included a rationale I must have missed previously- "pervasive vulgarity."
Fits trump to a tee; what a shame that few Republican voters would ban him as quickly as some of them take books they find objectionable to police & sheriffs.
Gawd I hope so
One can only hope. A burning dumpster fire of t-Rump.
"They're all but daring Trump to maintain his composure, confident that he can't do it even when he knows he's being baited. Do you think it will work? I do."
I'm not at all convinced that this approach is an effective strategy. I suspect, in fact, that it might reveal some blind spots on the part of Trump's opponents.
For approximately eight years now, much of the Left has been in a state of denial regarding how much it contributes to Trump's appeal. But the fault, dear Leftists, is not entirely on the Right, it is also on the Left.
Many of the overwhelmingly Liberal news outlets have spent years in a largely reductive analysis of Trump's movement, and they have arguably
revealed their own socio-political myopia by dismissing support for Trump as little or nothing more than reactionary racism.
But this sort of "analysis" does little if anything to educate readers; indeed, in its narrow-minded self-righteousness, such arguments may do more to confuse than to clarify the complex reality we actually live in.
One of the best recent examples I can think of is when Hilary Clinton stated that Trump followers are in a cult. Talk about projection! By refusing to grapple with the many sources of Trump's appeal, it is quite possibly the Left that estranges itself even further from reality than the right. And it is exactly that kind of pompous disdain that undoubtedly drives people further into Trump's orbit.
And attempting to bait Trump into reckless behavior, seemingly in the belief that he will then look worse than the craziness on the Left, strikes me as similarly short-sighted. His supporters will not care how crazy Trump acts. And, rather than dismissing those supporters as cultists for their fidelity to Trump, I think it could be a constructive exercise for the Left to look for alternate explanations.
Is it possible, for example, that the 70+ million Trump supporters who voted for him in 2020 are not all narrow-minded bigots or reactionary fools? Is it possible that many if not most of them understand Trump's failings perfectly well yet continue to support him anyway? And is it possible that one of the reasons they do so is because they look at the Left and see entirely legitimate reasons to believe that it's an even more destructive entity than Trump himself?
So, rather focusing primarily on baiting Trump into acting out (something we've all seen ad nauseum in recent years), I think it could be a better strategy for the Left to focus on fixing its own unpopular traits (something that we have barely seen at all in recent years).
Biden should be out there arguing for equality of opportunity (not equity or equal outcomes). He should be praising the strengths of a meritocracy and telling us how he will make ours more fair. He should embrace a very popular form of social justice which looks past our differences rather than the extremely unpopular form of social justice (predominating over newsrooms, campuses, and other left-leaning spaces) that divisively highlights them. And, obviously, he should be championing border security as an entirely legitimate concern of any sovereign nation.
If and when people raise objections to DEI, an ideology that can and should easily be faulted, they should be listened to rather than dismissed as conservatives.
If and when someone expresses a completely understandable hesitancy about allowing biological men (trans women) onto girls sports teams, a political movement that actually wants to continue existing (let alone win elections) will acknowledge the validity of such concerns rather than religiously condemning them as evil or even genocidal.
And when people promote free speech, an absolutely dire necessity at this point in time, they should be embraced as Liberals rather than shunned by the Left as speaking on behalf of the supposedly privileged and powerful.
Baiting Trump may perhaps have a small impact on the very few undecided voters still out there. But convincing as many voters as possible that the Left is not in fact crazier than Trump would, in my opinion, be a much more effective approach.
Either you have logorrhea, or you are following Roger Stone's strategy of "Flood the zone with sh!t."
😂😂😂😂
That is normally attributed to Bannon, e.g.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/impeachment-trial-trump-bannon-misinformation
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html
TLDR
The MSM has been giving Trump and his followers a free ride for years. And Trump supporters are a cult by any reasonable definition of cult you care to quote.
One last thing, please be more concise. Nobody likes to read long wordy posts.
I don't think he knows he's being baited. Trump is 100% id.
Trump supporters’ love for him is rooted in emotion, not rational thought. If we ever succeed in making him look truly undeniably stupid, a good share of his supporters will turn on him and hate him for letting them down. I saw it happen to Nixon when the White House tapes were released. I say we go for it.