LA Times columnist Anita Chabria ponders what Donald Trump was really up to in his disastrous interview with Black journalists yesterday:
Trump offended his Black audience. Mistake or part of the plan?
At best, Trump was grabbing headlines that in recent days have slipped out of his grasp.... At worst, the whole thing was meant to show off to his base, proving “he is willing and able to stand up to Black people and to make a case that he is the same person wherever he goes.”
Trump knows perfectly well how to pander to a crowd—just listen to his comments a few days ago to a Christian audience—so it's only natural to wonder if he was being deliberately insulting in front of a Black audience.
Who knows, really? The mind of Trump is a dark and chaotic place. But I'd bet against it. I think this was just another example of Trump being unable to control himself when the pressure gets too high. He has nothing to prove to his base, after all, and in his disordered imagination he really and truly can't figure out why Black people might not like him. To him, it makes perfect sense that a Black audience would eat up his insinuation that Kamala Harris isn't really Black and therefore doesn't deserve their support. This is the same genre of imbecilic attack that works great in a Republican primary, for example, so why not here? He doesn't understand that stuff this stupid only works when you're among fans who mindlessly lap up everything you say.
As for calling the interviewers nasty, that's also something that works great for Trump when he's among friends. He doesn't realize that it sounds defensive and idiotic to anyone else.
So, no, I don't think this was deliberate provocation on Trump's part. He truly believes he deserves the Black vote because he thinks he deserves everyone's vote. That's what happens when you lose touch with reality.
Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of Trump? The Shadow knows!
Heh.
As I noted in the previous thread on this, with Trump, never attribute to strategic thinking what can best be explained by unfathomable idiocy. Kevin's right -- Trump thought he could diss Harris's racial identity in front of them and they'd start clapping and going "Hey, yeah, she's mixed race!! What's up with *that*?" Because of course to him, race is about purity of the blood and all that.
Again, just the stupidest goddamn person to ever rise to such prominence in American life.
Aside from recent immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, there are almost no Americans who are labelled "black" that are not of mixed race. The slave owners' nasty habit of raping their female slaves has assured that the descendants of slaves almost all have slave-owner ancestors.
Surely, even Trump is not so dumb that he doesn't know that.
never under estimate trump's lack of intellectual curiosity.
????
Yes, the average black person in the US is over 20% European. Although many black people have thought they had a lot of Native American ancestry, it's actually something under 1% on average.
Not so sure about Conald not being that dumb.
I would absolutely assume that Trump doesn't know that. It's not something he cares about, how would he have ever learned it.
Do you suppose he knows what the "one drop rule" is, and how current black Americans remember and understand it?
I only learned these things well after half of my life was gone, and only then because I was genuinely curious about black Americans, and found a place where I could listen and learn.
Is that a thing you would expect to see in a Trump biography?
However, it's not about being dumb. It's about not caring.
+1
" It's about not caring"
and +10.
One of the things that people misunderstand about Trump is that many of the things that he doesn't know is not because of stupidity, but bcause he doesn't care about anything except himself, so knows nothing about things that don't directly affect him.
????
he saw ados/fba arguments work against kamala in 2019 when hurled by boosters of bernie, elizabeth, & tulsi & figured it would work again, netting him plus-votes from both black voters & scumbag leftists.
Your imagination is a very exciting place!
He can't handle being challenged. He got asked a tough question, and he lashed out like any moron would have.
"The mind of Trump is a dark and chaotic place"
I can only agree 100% on that! But I can't agree that he was just "outta control." His tone was generally pretty calm-- granted that his pronunciation was much more clipped than with his own crowds, probably meaning he was tense-- and of the reasoning-painfully-with-idiots variety, which indicates to me that he planned to be oppositional and provocative going in. Which lines up very closely to what was projected and said later that day in Harrisburg, and this whole line of attack is pretty much a carbon copy of the "Pocahontas" smear against Warren, also planned.
Finally, when "the pressure gets too high," I think what he does is push harder on forcing his kind of people into binary decisions. That audience wasn't his kind of people, but he got a lot of usable snippets to spread among the devoted. He does feel in his guts that he deserves support from everyone, but that doesn't mean he'll pander to every kind of crowd. He panders to people who support him already. For the others, he'd much rather *force* them to back him than *entice* them.
Upshot is, if I was a betting man I'd say let's watch the pattern over the next several days and see which view is closer to how he tracks.
Whatever trumps intentions, the proper response is to say, “It’s really a shame that young man missed.” So close.
Trump is the most effective campaigner for the Democrats currently extant. It would be a huge advantage to the Republicans if the young man had not missed.
I think his sons think that.
On the one hand, having a different Republican candidate would put the country in less danger. On the other hand, it could be JD Vance, who would be worse than Trump.
disagree. completely.
'say something stupid and racist' is trump's tried and true formula for getting on the front page
instead of writing up an earnest analysis concluding 'yes, she's actually black' the press would be better served by calling this stuff out as trump's self-serving bullshit designed to get the media talking about him
it's always lucy and the fucking football, like they haven't seen this ploy ten thousand times before
I disagree and for the most part (note the date and time of this rare occurrence) agree with Kevin. Who know what goes through Drumpf's addled brain (and even a non-addled brain becomes warped after years of being surrounded by a bubble of stooges and lickspittles), but he probably more or less expected to be hailed by the crowd, or at least the media, as the Really Great Emancipator. But when he's in the unusual circumstance of being confronted with actual tough questions (though quite fair ones that most politicians get daily and can easily deal with) he becomes genuinely incensed and lashes out. As Josh Marshall noted today, the people who think he is playing the Drumpf version of twelve dimensional chess are simply wrong; it's just an outburst.
true enough, but he also knows these outbursts will get him media attention
trump is not religious or christian in any way, shape, or form, but he never has outbursts that criticize the religious right
he also uses f-bombs in private, but never when cameras are rolling
his 'outbursts' are carefully monitored, they're not uncontrolled accidents
I think it’s a mix, so yer both right. I think it WAS deliberate, to get attention, revive his campaign (which has been dead in the water), and play the race card (which was always going to be central to his campaign against Harris). But I think he overstepped his mark rather badly, winging it (as he very often does) and off balance from both what’s happened recently and the questions from the journos. (Plus he’s definitely losing it mentally — his touch just isn’t as sure any more.). Overall, a deliberate ploy, but flubbed by and because of him.
here's today's entry in trump's 'insult-your-way-to-the-front-page' strategy
(wapo):
Trump falsely calls Schumer a ‘proud member of Hamas'
not an outburst, not an accident, obviously planned and executed as a way to get discussions of harris's VP pick and the russian prisoner swap off the front page and focused on him
Yup. The usual me-me-me, plus some omg-my-campaign-is-dead-in-the-water panic. But as I say, I think he's losing his touch. Schumer a "member of Hamas?" Yeah it's outrageous, gets attention, but it's DUMB outrageous. It's like LAUGHABLY stupid. I'm sure it will get media attention, but I'd guess not the kind he hopes, and not the kind that will appeal to anybody but his already-fervent base.
Jeez. Such a close race. Sh!t like this could matter...
yeah, his numbers have been flatlined for months so he's just throwing shit at the wall
but trump has always been more focused on winning by having his base get their rage on; going mushy centrist isn't his thing
"obviously planned and executed as a way to get discussions of harris's VP pick and the russian prisoner swap off the front page and focused on him"
There's a lot of tedious circularity in this sort of thinking. Trump does a thing, it results in X, Y, and Z, somebody seizes on thing Y and sagely pronounces that Trump "planned and executed" the thing to achieve Y, because after all Trump (probably) didn't do the thing by accident and Y did happen so not only must he have intended that to be the outcome, Y is probably also Something Good For Trump that he wanted all along.
I look at this and see nothing different than if any belligerent old racist who, with arrogance born out of stupidity, decided to confront a bunch of people of color with his idiotic talking points ("she's not *really* even Black!" "You tell me what this 'DEI' thing is!").
This is your uncle at Thanksgiving drunkenly harranging your neice with dubious claims about how nobody cared about pronouns until some college professors started making a big deal out of it, or how native americans didn't even know what casinos were until white people showed up so how come they have casinos now etc. It's not strategic--it's the result of echo-chambered close-mindedness and a rather pitiful inability to read the room.
Trump is the guy who wanted to buy Greenland. The guy who thought that maybe Obama's birth certificate would say "muslim" on it. The guy who ranted about nonexistent prayer rugs and suped-up muscle cars at the border because he saw that in a goddamn movie. There's no careful strategy happening here.
Instead, all of us feel this pull to attribute strategy to him, because otherwise we are confronted with the swirling nihilistic void that comes from contemplating that yes, the president/former president (and all the people around him) maybe really are that dumb. It's best to resist that pull.
i don't think he's doing 12-d strategy here; he just knows the press pay attention to him when he 'gish gallops' his appearances with wingnut-friendly 4chan-inspired drek
i'm sure he has someone on staff that reads the msg boards and feeds him the latest right wing crap, then he wraps it all up in plausible deniability/vagueness like 'some people are saying biden drinks adrenochrome with his morning OJ; i dunno if that's true, maybe... maybe not... but someone should really look into that'
it's not genius at work; trump's secret sauce is a pretty simple template and very repetitive so it's easy to remember
he thinks this really works for him, and it does... to a point.
hopefully for the rest of us that point sits closer to 47% than 53%
say something stupid and racist isn't trump's formula. trump is stupid and racist, so he says stupid, racist crap all the time.
`I don't know why more attention isn't given to the fact that Trump thinks that Black people should love him for preventing them from having to compete with Hispanic immigrants for low paying, dangerous, manual labor that doesn't require English speaking ability. Trump obviously thinks those are the only jobs Blacks can do. To me, that is far more offensive than mispronouncing names or calling women nasty.
far more offensive
stack ranking trump's various stupidities would be a demoralizing task
i'd need three fingers of something dark and cask strength to get started and a long hot shower when i was done
Any discussion of what Trump is thinking should always begin with understanding that you're dealing with a psychopathic narcissist. He truly can't fathom why everyone doesn't recognize his brilliance and insight. That's why he has no filter.
Good lord. He absolutely knew that he was insulting Harris. Those insults were 100% deliberate. Now, whether he knew the audience would also be insulted, who cares? It's irrelevant.
Trump went into that event with a deliberate plan to spew insults. And he did.
There's no legitimate reason to continue to try to explain or excuse Trump's bullshit. Yet it's been happening a lot here lately.
Yep, and he knows how it plays to his racist base.
"Who knows, really? The mind of Trump is a dark and chaotic place."
Exactly. So the only question is whether his insults to black journalists will help or hurt him in the election. The rational mind says "hurt", but in the deep unconscious of American voters' minds, who knows, indeed.
I have always considered that Trump's statements and decisions are governed much more by instinct than reason. More snakelike than human. Yet snakes often get their prey.
One can only operate on the hope that Trump has miscalculated, and it will cost him. If that be the case, evidence for it might come in the crosstabs of polls which would show him losing minority voters. I expect that will be the case.
WASHINGTON, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Attorney Jeffrey Clark, a senior U.S. Justice Department official during Donald Trump's presidency, should have his law license suspended for two years for acting dishonestly in his efforts to help the former president overturn his 2020 election defeat, a Washington legal panel recommended on Thursday.
Clark acted with "extraordinary recklessness" in his attempts to send a letter in December 2020 and January 2021 falsely claiming that the Justice Department had identified concerns about the integrity of the election, a three-member committee of District of Columbia Board on Professional Responsibility said.
Only a suspension? He participated in the act of over throwing a duly elected president. I don't care how small a part he had, as a lawyer he should have known better. He should be disbarred.
In the aftermath of this someone posted an early 90s clip of casino era Trump testifying in a hearing. He’s talking about Native Americans running rival casinos and he attacks them with what was to him the ultimate gotcha - “They don’t look Indian to me”. Like they should have had a bow and arrow or something.
He’s only interested in appearances. Everything is skin deep to him and all stereotypes apply. All the crap about central casting and beautiful women and Jews with their money and lawless inner cities.
Kamala Harris is Black AND Asian. How can he work with that? He’s got target blindness. He’s enraged she won’t reduce to a stereotype simple enough to hang a slur on. He’s really pissed off the script has changed and he’s too impatient and angry to learn a new one. So he lashes out.
I was immediately reminded of that hearing when I heard Trump talk about Harris. For some reason I remeber his words vividly and the disgusting tone in which it was said. He thought he had a valid argument then too. He never learns.
After a couple generations in North America virtually no one is fully, or 'pure', one thing or another.
We should have some kind of national symbol or flag for muttliness.
And a muttly holiday.
Mutts are usually more healthier than pure breeds.
Exactly! American exceptionalism!
Yeah, diversity is healthier than monoculture across the board, but look how hard people fight against health on those terms.
To my mind, we have a muttly holiday. It's called Thanksgiving.
It's really my favorite because (almost) everyone in America can relate to the story of coming here from somewhere else. If you're native, I don't blame you for not participating, but some do, because they recognize the value and power of that story (and perhaps they are some who didn't suffer the most at the hands of Manifest Destiny).
MEOOOOOW. Reap what you sow from the CONVICED whore monger....Kitties know.
Trump generally knows what works for him. He is still not experienced in traditional politics but he had years of experience on a successful "reality" show and has also been involved in professional wrestling. Just call what he does "kayfabe" - it works with a large part of the white population - enough to get him elected in 2016.
Is he really trying to appeal to black voters? What he probably does want to do is reinforce the idea among his base that it is blacks and Democrats who are the real racists. Also the idea that he is persecuted when a black interviewer asks hard or "nasty" questions.
Probably there is no detailed conscious master plan for this - as I say he has found out through experience what works and stays on the same modus operandi.
Yes. He is an 'agent provocateur' who knows that his provocations strengthen the bonds between himself and his supporters.
He's always insulting and not always on purpose. He thought he had a valid argument about her racial identity. He thought wrong obviously. He thought he could get people to dislike her by pretending her racial identity as a black woman is faked. Again he thought wrong. Or more precisely he didn't think much at all. It's his thing. He thinks he's far smarter than he is and anything he says or does is smart by default. It's why he seems shocked to get the reaction he does sometimes.
He can't think on his feet; he acts instinctively. He instinctively resorted to personal insults and false accusations to deflect from the questions that required a thoughtful answer.
He hates strong, smart Black women showing him up. If there is one demographic he fears and loathes losing to, it's a Black woman. He wanted to pander to Black men but the NABJ put three Black women on stage.
He blew up their strategy because his instinct is foundationally racist and having to face Kamala Harris is unbearable for Trump. She's going to destroy him in the debate.
why didn't his people insist on van jones being one of the questioners onstage?
I read a suggestion that he was actually confusing Kamala Harris with Nikki Haley. They both have a 'k' in their first names and the last names starts with 'Ha'. That would explain why he believed he had caught her in a lie since he knows Haley has a pure Indian background and thought she suddenly claimed she was now black. Possible if you assume his cognitive abilities aren't what they used to be.
That is absolutely plausible. Other people just all blur together for him.
I guess I can agree that there was no ‘deliberation’ or intention behind his utterances, but certainly the racism and misogyny that he has exhibited for decades was on display again. His cognitive decline has reduced his ability to edit, not that he ever had much to begin with.
One of Trump's quaint (almost wrote "weird") idiosyncracies is his conviction that if he only just learned something for the first time, nobody else knew it either. Because he knows more about everything than anybody. Thus his frequent "Not many people know this ..." pronouncements followed by some banal fact that lots of people know. It's the same bizarre mentality that leads him to claim he invented or was the first to think up nicknames and phrases that have been in common use for decades, as in "I realised 'USA' includes 'us'. I guess nobody else ever noticed that."
So it's quite plausible that one of his staffers told him recently that Harris passed as an Indian until it suited her to convert to Blackness. He told a rally the other day that he never knew much about her except that she was "a very bad border czar", which might have been honest. So having learned this scandalous truth, he was excited to share it with a bunch of Real Blacks, confident they'd be stunned and horrified by the revelation.
Agreed. He's not the brilliant, deliberate strategist people claim.
I repeat my comment from a previous thread, that what he said about police, i.e. police officers should have immunity but his supporters can attack them and will also have immunity, is far more dangerous and worrying than trying to insult Harris about her "blackness".
By now he doesn't even try to disguise it. If he is president, police will be able to be as brutal as they want to, except that they must be on the side of Trump supporters. And he doesn't need to disguise it, because people, for example on this blog, simply ignore it.
It’s what psychopaths do. A Psychopath is an extreme sociopath— everything that sociopath is but worse. he fits it like a glove. And to our great shame, half of America loves it.
“behavior that conflicts with social norms
disregarding or violating the rights of others
inability to distinguish between right and wrong
difficulty with showing remorse or empathy
tendency to lie often
manipulating and hurting others
recurring problems with the law
general disregard toward safety and responsibility
expressing anger and arrogance on a regular basis”
They support it because
1) They believe in their own sense of right and wrong, which they do not think is subject to a vote.
2) They need to see their values expressed as laws for validation. This is the point at which I diverge from them. I also don't think that right and wrong are up for a vote, but when nobody else is harmed, I don't see where a law is needed.
3) They understand that under conventional pollitics, they will lose. (I agree with this assesment, as well) So they swing toward someone who cheats - nothing else will work - and who tells them that the other side has been cheating for decades, so it's fine.
It's all this "righteous mission" which employs the vulgar. While I think it's true that God can use the vulgar as well as the righteous, I don't think God wants people to try to advance his will through a deal with the Devil.
The whole thing is as if in the Oscars it’s “The Searchers” (movie chosen carefully, by the way, look it up if curious) is competing against some Jonathan Demme movie (maybe “Something Wild”, but maybe “Stop Making Sense” is a better choice) for best picture, if you get my meaning.
I’d say Trump knows his people love “The Searchers” and find “Stop Making Sense” really weird and he just instinctively plays to them, though it’s clear from his language that he thought ahead of time about this attack saying she was Indian and then decided to be black.
Maybe the guy who successfully divided the country on race, then ripped it off, is trying to divide the country by race in order to rip it off again.
Too far fetched?