At the risk of stating the obvious, the July 2019 US Politics Thread is horse-sh*t

in a better world the Epstein scandal would rid us of both forever

Those Tweets were NOT Racist. I don’t have a Racist bone in my body! The so-called vote to be taken is a Democrat con game. Republicans should not show “weakness” and fall into their trap. This should be a vote on the filthy language, statements and lies told by the Democrat.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2019

.....Congresswomen, who I truly believe, based on their actions, hate our Country. Get a list of the HORRIBLE things they have said. Omar is polling at 8%, Cortez at 21%. Nancy Pelosi tried to push them away, but now they are forever wedded to the Democrat Party. See you in 2020!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2019

Oh, ok. I guess that settles it.

even if clinton weren't involved, do you think republicans would care that trump hung out with a pedophile? donald trump has probably raped multiple women, there are 2 sitting supreme court justices that have assaulted women, and republicans (and democrats) have a long history of looking the other way at sexual abuse in the church. what do they care about epstein and trump? we have to stop pretending like some sort of damning fact about what they've done will "bring them down".

JUST NOW: I asked @KellyannePolls, who’d just said @realDonaldTrump was not telling Omar/Tlaib/Pressley/AOC to go back to Somalia/Gaza/Puerto Rico/etc, which countries he was referring to.

She responded by asking me where my ancestors came from, thereby confirming what he meant

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) July 16, 2019

Omar is polling at 8%, Cortez at 21%

Omar is not polling at 8%.
Cortez is not polling at 21%.

Capitalizing 'Racist' appears to be Very Important for him. Perhaps he's subtly signifying that he's just a run-of-the-mill, lowercase racist.

I do believe Trump when he says he doesn't have a racist bone in his body. I think his body cavity is just filled with a semi-solid protoplasmic ooze of undiluted racism, like imagine a banana slug comprised entirely of race hate.

Racist exoskeleton with a Jame Gumb-style flesh suit.

really proud of the house leadership for starting this whole fucking shitshow on friday night and leaking that wack ass poll to axious, that is now being cited in bad faith by president caligula. good job.

axiooooooooooooooos

Any serious policy solution to racism must begin with some kind of racist bone detector.

— Russell Brandom (@russellbrandom) June 30, 2019

good morning!

donald trump doesn't have a racist bone in his body!

he does have a racist brain, tho.

He only cares about blood.

AAAAAAAGHGHGHGH

even if clinton weren't involved, do you think republicans would care that trump hung out with a pedophile? donald

trump has probably raped multiple women, there are 2 sitting supreme court justices that have assaulted women, and republicans (and democrats) have a long history of looking the other way at sexual abuse in the church. what do they care about epstein and trump? we have to stop pretending like some sort of damning fact about what they've done will "bring them down".

Who said anything about bringing them down? You just want to browbeat them with it so it dominates the conversation and suppresses turnout on the margins by 2-3% which could be decisive in a close election (which this will be).

https://img.fireden.net/tg/image/1495/82/1495825236912.jpg

I like to imagine after four years of 'Troll troll troll, bleepity-blorp, troll troll, derpy-derp. SAD!' tweets, some non-negligible portion of the population will have developed the skills to effortlessly mutter 'fucking ANYway...' and get on with discussing absolutely anything other than what the Troll-in-Chief wants us to be discussing. It's a dream I have, a beautiful dream.

Who said anything about bringing them down?

"Bringing them down" means defeating trump at the polls.

at this point, trump is who he is. everyone has formed an opinion about him, and not too many minds are going to change as a result of whatever new terrible thing he does. his support may drop 2-3%, as you say, and then a week later it will go back up to where it was. we've seen almost 4 years of this now (counting his campaign). he was right when he said he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and no of his supporters would care.

so we know who he is, and we know how is immune. so take the fight to those who enable him - the racist republicans who don't have a word to say when the president says blatantly racist things. trump is immune. not all of the republicans are. it's time to stop ASKING republicans what they have to say about trump's racism. they have nothing to say. the baseline understanding, now, should be that they are all racists and that they enjoy the benefits of being leaders of the party at the twilight of the Southern Strategy.

it wouldn't solve the root problems but I wake every day hoping he died in the night

On one hand I can't believe that more people wouldn't care that there's a record of him raping 13-year old children. But on the other hand there's no sign that his supporters have cared about anything else he's done.

Here's the thing, though: none of that is true, it's just a figment conjured up by the fake news media.

It really is that simple for these people.

also did you hear about bill clinton and the 12 year old?

it's a page from the climate change denier playbook: it's not real, and if it is, it's actually not as bad as something else

They genuinely believe it too. Or so it seems.

the pee tape could show up and now it would be dismissed as a deep fake

Empirical reality has long vanished. It's just a mythological battle of archetypes at this point, the neolithic age is back.

I can't tell if I hate him more every day or if the hate has maxed out and it just manifests differently from day to day. But in any case, the guy who swears at rallies and is on tape saying "I moved on her like a bitch" and "grab em by the pussy" can get way the fuck out of here with his pearl-clutching wrt foul language.

Trump doesn't think women should poop or swear.

I feel increasingly like the core of the problem is that, because the current context is sui generis in so many ways and was just suddenly plopped into this central position in our lives, we just don't have any pre-existing experience from which we can draw an effectual response and it's made everyone varying degrees of crazy. On every side you have people who can't wrap their heads around the behavior of this figure who's been imposed on everyone's life, and on one side they try to pretend that the worst stuff isn't happening or try to twist it into something they can still support, while on the other side people are just staring aghast with no idea of what to do. It's like the time my roommate walked into my bedroom at 4 AM and started pissing on my floor. I had no immediate means of understanding or responding to the acceptable parameters of reality being so rudely shattered.

Good luck winning while talking about “the issues.”

I think you misunderstand me: don’t say he said something racist, say he is racist. Don’t say he knew a pedophile, say existing evidence points to him being a pedophile. Don’t say these things once or twice: they should be the core of the strategy. Repetition is how Trump beats his phrases into the media’s and public’s heads and controls the narrative - Dems must use the same strategy or they will lose (and maybe will anyway).

The American public is too dumb and uninformed to care about issues.

We really need to cut it with that talking point already. The extent to which it's true is largely systemic and intentional and potentially-reversible if we refrain from treating the mass of the American public like a bunch of subhuman rubes.

Like, yeah, without some effort to counter the effects, the kids currently being educated under the DeVos regime are likely to develop into incurious drudges. It's not like it's inherent to their character.

cf one of Hillary's many errors was the deplorables thing, which succeeded in doing nothing except rallying the right wing.

Right. Dems need to cut it with the snoot. No one who's on the fence wants to join a team that's looking at them like a bunch of unwashed dipshits.

So what doesn't count as an error when faced with this monstrosity?

she was too low on her deplorable %

The extent to which it's true is largely systemic and intentional

Ok

and potentially-reversible

Nah. Convincing them Will. Never. Happen. Best Hope is not to let them take over and drown us all with them.

Wasn’t the foul language he accused the congresswomen of using just Trump’s words quoted back?

maybe in some cases, but i'm sure he's thinking of Rashida Tlaib's "impeach the motherfucker" comment, among others

Trump thrives when he's being attacked and since he'll go lower and his base will eat it up no mud-slinging will ever work, and maybe the single tactic that might work for the candidate facing him would be to take his policies seriously and treat him with respect and a gentle firmness and shit like "look i just think it's not working, and we need a change", be the intelligent one in the room because we know he can't compete at that level. and when people aren't attacking him and being calm with him, respectful to him, he wilts and lowers his guard.

I am ok with them using 'squad.' I am ok with people refusing to equate younger feminine terms with weakness/flightiness/any otherness.

Trump thrives when he's being attacked and since he'll go lower and his base will eat it up no mud-slinging will ever work, and maybe the single tactic that might work for the candidate facing him would be to take his policies seriously and treat him with respect and a gentle firmness and shit like "look i just think it's not working, and we need a change", be the intelligent one in the room because we know he can't compete at that level. and when people aren't attacking him and being calm with him, respectful to him, he wilts and lowers his guard.

This always works with bullies.

That was Obama’s strategy with Republicans for 8 years.

If i just explain this Republican-sourced healthcare plan clearly and calmly, the Republicans and American people will come around.

Warren should walk out for their first debate and fake a punch followed by two for flinching. Maybe save the atomic wedgie for the second debate?

I do think there's some appeal in at least trying to pin him down to some specifics, especially considering his interlocutors never do. like when he tries to say he's going to replace Obamacare with something really great, just keep hammering him to give you some actual fucking details about what that means. of course he's going to try and just say "you'll see, you'll see, we're working on something that people are going to be very happy with" but you can't let him off the hook like that. even something as basic as "how are you going to strip away everything else in the ACA and yet still ensure that people with pre-existing conditions can obtain affordable coverage?" because he obviously he has zero fucking clue.

you go at his policies, debate him on policy, you don't attack him as if you need to highlight the fact that he's a piece of shit. everyone knows this. you highlight his politics, engage him at that level. good luck attacking him for being "deplorable". no one is going to suddenly say "hey wow you're right this Trump guy is bad news." the way to make him look bad is to try to get him to be a politician, not a personality. if he tries to change it, bring it back to policies every single time. don't take the bait.

Feel like yesterday's press conference with the Squad is a masterclass in how to respond/not respond to that dumb oaf.

The suggestions above assume a level playing field that doesn't exist. Democrats committing similar sins to Republicans are punished more harshly because we self-regulate, but also because we're supposed to be the goody-goody party so any slipup is a bigger deal because we're supposed to be above it.

You know how many times I have read the opinion, in a situation where a Democrat shared actual "fake news" or exaggerated, that this is the type of thing that will put voters off and send them to Trump? A guy who knowingly makes shit up on a daily basis! We get penalized, he doesn't.

It's because the anti-liberal attack methods worked. As terrible and uncreative a word it is, "libtard" is well embedded in the political lexicon. Mainstream America associates liberalism with weakness and Clinton fumbles.

"Deplorables" galvanized his base, but Republican Congressmen were still fronting like they couldn't vote for Trump and acting as if the race was lost less than a month prior to the election.

We have to take the gloves off. Only the Squad has bothered to try.