Don't Get Psyched Out! Trump is an Evil Buffoon, Not an Evil Genius

Don’t Get Psyched Out! Trump Is an Evil Buffoon, Not an Evil Genius.
The final weeks of this campaign will be hard fought. Now’s not the time to be jumping at shadows.

Michael Tomasky
September 23, 2024
The New Republic

There are six weeks to go now, and as we enter the home stretch of this election year, I think it’s crucial for all of us to remember something. Liberals tend to ascribe to conservatives the quality of an evil genius. It plays into a lot of stereotypes. In one of my all-time favorite Simpsons episodes, the head of the Springfield Republican Committee was, of course, Mr. Burns. Dracula was also a member.

In real life, Karl Rove probably has a lot to do with this posture. The media elevated him to genius stature quite early on in George W. Bush’s campaign. In fact, Rove was wrong about a lot of stuff. His candidate didn’t win the popular vote, lucked out in Florida because a bunch of Jewish voters in Palm Beach County accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan, and ended up being “elected” by an unprincipled Supreme Court. Later, the Republican realignment that Rove confidently predicted never materialized, instead crashing hard on the rocks of a dishonest and costly war and a deregulatory scheme that nearly destroyed the world economy. But the media, forever on the hunt for a Great Man of History, venerated him, and as a result he got in liberals’ heads.

My message to you today is on the importance of not getting psyched out in these next six weeks. Our tendency, at times like these, is to see catastrophe lurking everywhere. Remember the waning days of the 2008 campaign? Remember the stories in those closing weeks that surely meant the death of the Obama candidacy? The Obama aunt who was living in the United States illegally? The young John McCain volunteer who went to the police claiming that a Black man attacked her and carved a “B” (for Barack) on her face with a knife? I remember people saying, “Oh my God, that’s it, we’re cooked.” Obama won handily.

Republicans aren’t evil geniuses. That is especially true of the Republican now running for president. He may be evil. But he’s no genius. He’s a buffoon. And while he may of course still win—he is a buffoon who is unfortunately optimized for the vicissitudes of the Electoral College—my little sniff of the zeitgeist suggests to me that he and his campaign are making blunder after blunder, and they’re hurting him.

Take this Springfield jag they’ve been on. Trump, J.D. Vance, and their aides argue that it doesn’t matter that they’re lying about Calico a la King and Schnauzer Scallopine; every day that immigration is dominating the headlines is a good day for them.

This is exactly the kind of thing worry-minded liberals are always inclined to concede. But it is true? I say it’s nonsense. I don’t think this story has helped them at all. Trump still has an overall advantage on immigration in polls, but at least one poll came out last week showing Kamala Harris within five points of him on that issue (and two points on the economy). And anyway, as the Springfield story’s legs continued to sprint into days three, four, five, and six, was the story really “immigration”? Or did it morph into “more crazy shit these crazy bastards say”?

I contend the latter. And it’s pretty clear that if the Trump/Vance ticket loses, cat-and-dog-eating is going to be a late-night TV punchline for years to come.

The headline of the Politico Playbook email to subscribers Sunday morning summed it up: “New polls boost Harris as Trump hits turbulence.” The good-news poll, from NBC, had Harris up five points nationally. The Trumpy turbulence referred to a Washington Post story that described the free-for-all that the Trump campaign has become. One aide told the paper: “The through-line is his campaign is 96 percent him. It’s not even ‘Let Trump be Trump.’ It’s ‘Let Trump be unsupervised at all times.’ They just feel like, ‘We can’t control him, so let’s hope he wins anyways.’”

This does not bode well for MAGA world. I suspect that slowly, the polls are going to get a little worse for him. It will start to look, or maybe already does look, like Harris has distinct advantages in Michigan and Wisconsin; some recent polls are even suggesting that Pennsylvania is tilting in that direction. Mark Robinson’s web-surfing history has probably made Harris the slight favorite now in North Carolina. Florida is down to four points, and Texas, the perpetual white whale of Democratic dreams, is actually looking a little beige, at six. I wouldn’t bet today on Harris winning either of those, but the point here is that if they become part of the media narrative, that Florida and Texas are in any way up for grabs, it’s going to drive Trump nuts. Nutsier.

Look: Trump could obviously still win. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. His deportation plan is pretty popular. There are still things I think Harris needs to do. The “vibes” phase of the campaign was awesome, but it’s over (although the Oprah event was pretty vibe-y and seemed a success). She does need to do some media interviews, and then interviews with TikTokkers and YouTubers and such, who are more important now than the media.

I think she should also give a couple big policy speeches, of the sort candidates usually do early in the process—you know, laying out their foreign policy vision at Georgetown, that sort of thing. Her abbreviated campaign skipped that whole part. I think she needs a couple high-profile events like that—an economic vision speech at Michigan State University, a foreign policy vision speech at Duke. She has a ton of sizzle but still needs a little more steak.

But she’s running a disciplined campaign. Trump is starting to flail. If he gets much farther behind, he’s going to start getting scary and dangerous—but that’s a future column. Right now, he’s sitting down there at Mar-a-Lago beginning to come to grips with the reality that he might lose to a Black woman, who royally thumped his ass the one time they shared a stage and who so far is surviving the attacks that I’m sure Trump thought would be pure gold, about her being a Marxist radical and not having borne children (that’s yet another column!). It’s got to be driving him bonkers.

So, take the last weeks of this campaign seriously enough to not get complacent—but do not impute to Trump or his Republican Party any manner of genius. They’re fools. They’re out of touch with middle America, compared to Harris and especially Tim Walz. Trump’s act—and that’s all it’s even been, an act—is getting old to the voters who don’t worship him but who took a flyer on him in 2016. Harris was right: Trump supporters bailing early on his rallies is becoming a familiar sight.

Come to think of it, that Simpsons episode included a few other recurring characters as members of the local GOP, and they were all clowns, one of them literally: Dr. Hibbert, Superintendent Chalmers, and Krusty. That’s mostly who we’re up against. So don’t spend the next six weeks panicking at the smallest setback. The one who should be panicking is the guy who’s behind in every poll and is scheduled to be sentenced three weeks after Election Day.

FOOTNOTE: At the time, I loved the McCain volunteer story. It was so, as the kids say, cray-cray. The young woman was named Ashley Todd. Eventually, she confessed that she fabricated the story. The local police were aided in their investigation by the fact that the carved “B” on her face was backwards—she’d clearly slashed herself while looking in a mirror! But it had some Obama backers in a panic for a minute.

quote:

Don’t Get Psyched Out! Trump Is an Evil Buffoon, Not an Evil Genius.
The final weeks of this campaign will be hard fought. Now’s not the time to be jumping at shadows.

I read most of the article and I have a problem with it.

First - "Don't get psyched out"? Shit, it's too late for that. I already have a bad dose of TDS.

"Trump Is an Evil Buffoon, Not an Evil Genius". Let's leave out the word "evil". Substitute "Dark", as in Dark Knight. Then say: "Trump is a Genius Dark Knight Buffoon". Yea, I know that seems like a contradiction of terms, maybe an oxymoron. In the normal realm of buffoons, Trump is a genius. He's also Dark.

buf·foon
[bəˈfo͞on]
noun
a ridiculous but amusing person; a clown:
"they are simply incompetent buffoons who have no idea what they are doing"

Buffoon, implies incompetence to the point of ineffective or maybe harmless. OTOH, Trump, and especially Team, do know what they are doing. Deeming them incompetent IMO is grossly underestimating them. Were Hitler's enablers incompetent?

Look at the facts:
Trump is the GOP candidate.
He could win, or steal, the election and be our next POTUS.

Opinion:
It should have never happened this way. There is no logical reason that Trump(ism) has risen to the doorsteps of the WH, again. There are, however, illogical, illiberal, emotional, dark, buffoonish reasons. Trump is the Master Buffoon.

My point is that this article plays into a narrative we see here from some, which is it can't happen here.

It can happen here, and the likelihood is somewhere near 50/50 at this time. And the surge is led by a psycho buffoon.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...59083b912e00c&ei=158

'Make up anything': How Trump’s 'campaign strategy' prioritizes 'false narratives'
Story by Alex Henderson • 3h • 3 min read

==============================================

If Trump wins on that strategy, we can be sure his term in office will follow the theme, exponentially, in all aspects, impossible to fact check.

We already have seen that strategy many times in the GOP led congress, Comer, Jordon, and many others.

============================================

The word and definition of Buffoon, IMO really misdirects how we should think of/view Trump(ism).

So, I think of Trump as an analogy to a form of a Dark Knight.

There are many parallels when you look.

https://www.popmatters.com/dar...olan-2495477570.html

Order, Chaos, and Faith: The Themes and Form of ‘The Dark Knight’

https://filmcolossus.com/the-d...night-2008-explained

"The Dark Knight deftly navigates the tumultuous waters of morality and the elusive nature of justice. Its narrative isn’t merely a tale of a heroic caped vigilante battling a psychopathic villain, but a profound exploration of the duality of human nature and the thin line that separates order from chaos. The movie propels us into a world where the concepts of good and evil are not painted in clear blacks and whites but are steeped in varying shades of grey, forcing us to question our own perceptions of right and wrong."

But what is the alternative?

Bimbo Commie Word Salad Kamala??


Hahahaha

I want to follow up on the theme that Trump is a form of The Dark Knight.

I researched it some, looking for clarity and how the concept plays into reality, culture and politics, and history.

Trump just HAS to fit in somewhere, somehow. There has to be context. He and what he represents didn't just happen. And IMO, because we don't understand it, we don't know what to do about it.

I make the analogy to the Dark Knight.

So far, here's the best explanation I can find. I don't like getting into psychological stuff, but IMO that's where the answers are.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/...-a-postmodern-world/

The dark (k)night of a postmodern world
Tina Beattie
21 August 2008

(This article was written before Trump, but IMO it applies today.)

Here's an excerpt:

The Dark Knight unmasks the crisis of values in which America, and the west more widely, finds itself at the beginning of the 21st century. Cultural theorists portrayed the late 20th century in terms of "the postmodern condition": an era in which traditional values, identities and social institutions were disintegrating and being replaced by proliferating narratives, conflicting truth claims and multiple identities. For those secure and wealthy enough to enjoy the opportunities presented and the illusory freedoms offered, it was a time of parody and play; of irony and iconoclasm; of extravagance and experimentation. But since 9/11, the postmodern fantasy has become more nightmare than dream, as the rootless and drifting societies of the modern liberal democracies have come under assault by the violent forces of radical Islamism, and have in turn responded with war and the threat of war, and with new forms of terror and torture, surveillance and repression.

This is not the clash of civilisations between Islam and the west predicted by Samuel Huntington, although liberals and conservatives alike take refuge in this thesis because it offers at least some sense of stability, an "us" and "them" scenario which still allows for goodies and baddies, heroes and villains, the defenders of freedom and democracy against the forces of fanaticism and fundamentalism. However, what terrifies us is the dawning awareness that we are facing widespread social meltdown in which law and anarchy, heroism and terrorism, sanity and madness, are becoming more and more difficult to tell apart. It is this shifting, sliding, disintegrating world that Nolan evokes in The Dark Knight. Gotham is the postmodern state and we are its citizens. The choices we face are not those which are ranged around good and evil, right and wrong. They are the vicious and dreadful dilemmas we face when our own survival is a gamble which pits us against shadowy and unpredictable enemies who infiltrate and infect all our social and political institutions with fear and mistrust.

================

The Terror Within

Žižek has this to say of the hero figure:

"In political terms, the difference between classical tragedy and modern tragedy is the difference between (traditional) tyranny and (modern) terror. The traditional hero sacrifices himself for the Cause; he resists the pressure of the Tyrant and accomplishes his Duty, cost what it may; as such, he is appreciated, his sacrifice confers on him a sublime aura, his act is inscribed in the register of Tradition as an example to be followed."

However, in "the domain of modern tragedy", the sacrifice takes place not in the space of conflicting opposites - right and wrong, good and bad - but in the context of moral quandaries in which, in order to preserve what we depend upon, we must destroy our own dependence upon it, our own place inside it. That is the terror. It arises not from any external threat, but from within the systems by which we order our lives. We experience an irreconcilable conflict between the symbolic order with its laws and institutions, its ethics and values (a value system which is associated with and underpinned by a God of universal law and order, of prohibitions and commands), and the individual imperative to act in response to a different calling and a different form of divine command, in the context of an "absolute singularity that suspends the dimension of the Universal". Žižek explores this in the context of Søren Kierkegaard's reading of the story of Abraham, but the same dilemma resonates through The Dark Knight. Like Kierkegaard's Abraham, Nolan's Batman is "the knight of faith [who] dwells in the horrible domain beyond or between the two deaths, since he (is ready to) sacrifice(s) what is most precious to him".

==============================

The order of the lie

Yet The Dark Knight is not a story about divine laws and faith in transcendent if conflicting imperatives. It is rather a film about two forms of nihilism, both of which are consequent upon the disintegration of the truths of religion and then of reason which underpinned the traditional social order and created trust in its institutions and structures. The Dark Knight is played out in the context of what Ulrich Beck calls the "second Enlightenment" which, in Žižek's interpretation, is "the exact reversal of the aim of the ‘first Enlightenment'": to bring about a society in which fundamental decisions would lose their "irrational character and become fully grounded in good reasons". But, suggests Žižek, "the ‘second Enlightenment' imposes on each of us the burden of making crucial decisions which may affect our very survival without any proper foundation in Knowledge."

The Dark Knight explores this "second Enlightenment", in which the disintegration of universal reason and transcendent truth means that each of us bears the full weight of moral responsibility for the decisions we make and the actions we initiate, sometimes in the face of terrifyingly irrational forces. For example, there is a breathtaking variation on what is known in game theory as the Prisoners' Dilemma, when two shiploads of people must decide whether to blow up the other ship and thus preserve themselves, or take a chance on neither side activating the detonator and both dying. These are moments when ordinary individuals must choose between two equally devastating options with no knowledge to guide them and no absolute moral code to call upon.

In such moments, the film does not offer us nihilism versus meaning, the lie versus the truth. Rather, it offers us two different faces of nihilism - the nihilism of meaninglessness, nothingness and futility represented by the Joker, or the kind of nihilism we discover in Albert Camus's novel, The Plague, in which individual acts of goodness are our only defence against futility and despair. Ultimately, the redemptive promise of The Dark Knight depends upon the quiet dignity of individual acts of courage, even - or perhaps especially - when these are cloaked in the guise of the criminal and the outlaw. The will of the people here is not the rational foundation upon which freedom and democracy are built, as it was for the thinkers of the Enlightenment, but a brute force which demands its own survival, whatever the moral cost. This is a parable for our time, and the citizens of Gotham city give us a bleak insight into the moral bankruptcy of democracy in a post-9/11 world.

The law-abiding, morally complacent citizenry will condone extremes of violence as the condition of its own self-preservation, while looking to politicians to manufacture the mythical heroes and illusions of goodness which sustain its belief in its institutions and identity. We want heroes, but for this we need scapegoats. Here again, Žižek provides a lens through which to interpret the film's message. We collude in our own deception because, although we know that the political values which govern us are lacking in legitimate authority and corrupted by abusive power relations, we still depend upon the legitimacy they confer upon our actions and values. The symbolic order of modernity is "the big Other", an empty and foundationless illusion of power which we experience as a form of alienation and repression, but nonetheless we are compelled to respect and obey its laws and institutions, and so it is, to quote Žižek, "the order of the lie, of lying sincerely". We invest in its symbols of authority and conform to its demands, even as we recognise its degeneracy and its impotence.

The haunted space

The Dark Knight invites reflection upon the cost of survival and the limits of goodness in a world of corrupted and decadent institutions, in which nonetheless we have no alternative but to preserve and uphold those same institutions. The Joker may be a metaphor for radical Islamism, but he is also the enemy within, the annihilating impulse which is woven into the fabric of society and the individual psyche, as its seductive and destructive other. Only our ability to recognise and accommodate this chaos will enable us to avoid the Manicheism of a world divided between good and evil, and to negotiate a space of fragile survival within the corrupted and vulnerable institutions of our modern liberal societies. We are bereft of viable alternatives. As John Gray has argued in his book, Black Mass, post-Enlightenment societies have been vulnerable to utopian and idealistic revolutionary urges which have unleashed waves of destruction, for they too readily translate into totalitarian and fascist regimes.

This then is the dilemma of our postmodern condition. We know that the political and economic institutions upon which we depend shelter behind a masquerade of legitimate authority which barely conceals their deceitful and manipulative operations. The very agents who are responsible for defending our freedoms and our securities have become agents of repression and violence. But we also know that neither anarchy nor revolution can deliver the society we long for, and therefore we must work to mend the social fabric through individual acts of resistance and courage, recognising that it is not capable of affording us the protection it promises.

The Dark Knight ventures into this haunted space of political and psychological terror. It taps into our deepest and most unanswerable fears, the world of adult nightmares in which there is no happy ending and no resolution, just an unending and anguished question posed to each of us: who am I, what do I value, and how far am I willing to go in order to feel safe, to belong, to survive? If this is a question which presses upon each of us with growing urgency, it is an unbearable question for that bright and hopeful politician, Barack Obama. What price is he willing to pay to become part of the system? And what price might he yet have to pay to resist its corruption?

quote:

Originally posted by MJines:
The headline of the Politico Playbook email to subscribers Sunday morning summed it up: “New polls boost Harris as Trump hits turbulence.” The good-news poll, from NBC, had Harris up five points nationally. The Trumpy turbulence referred to a Washington Post story that described the free-for-all that the Trump campaign has become. One aide told the paper: “The through-line is his campaign is 96 percent him. It’s not even ‘Let Trump be Trump.’ It’s ‘Let Trump be unsupervised at all times.’ They just feel like, ‘We can’t control him, so let’s hope he wins anyways.’”

All of this gleefully assumes that we're past any reluctance to elect a woman president.

Not so fast, this remains to be seen. The real poll occurs on November 5. The others are just indications.

I disagree with the term dark knight, Kabob.
A knight has a code and ethics. Even a dark knight would have them, albeit, aligned to a different kingdom. Hence the term dark knight.
Trump has neither a code or ethics, and just could not be a knight of any sort.

quote:

Originally posted by TomP:

quote:

Originally posted by MJines:
The headline of the Politico Playbook email to subscribers Sunday morning summed it up: “New polls boost Harris as Trump hits turbulence.” The good-news poll, from NBC, had Harris up five points nationally. The Trumpy turbulence referred to a Washington Post story that described the free-for-all that the Trump campaign has become. One aide told the paper: “The through-line is his campaign is 96 percent him. It’s not even ‘Let Trump be Trump.’ It’s ‘Let Trump be unsupervised at all times.’ They just feel like, ‘We can’t control him, so let’s hope he wins anyways.’”

All of this gleefully assumes that we're past any reluctance to elect a woman president.

Not so fast, this remains to be seen. The real poll occurs on November 5. The others are just indications.

The country is full of men scared of powerful women. But Hillary drew 3 million more votes than trump. I see no reason why Harris can't better that.

quote:

Originally posted by wymple:

quote:

Originally posted by TomP:

quote:

Originally posted by MJines:
The headline of the Politico Playbook email to subscribers Sunday morning summed it up: “New polls boost Harris as Trump hits turbulence.” The good-news poll, from NBC, had Harris up five points nationally. The Trumpy turbulence referred to a Washington Post story that described the free-for-all that the Trump campaign has become. One aide told the paper: “The through-line is his campaign is 96 percent him. It’s not even ‘Let Trump be Trump.’ It’s ‘Let Trump be unsupervised at all times.’ They just feel like, ‘We can’t control him, so let’s hope he wins anyways.’”

All of this gleefully assumes that we're past any reluctance to elect a woman president.

Not so fast, this remains to be seen. The real poll occurs on November 5. The others are just indications.

The country is full of men scared of powerful women. But Hillary drew 3 million more votes than trump. I see no reason why Harris can't better that.

So, which is it, symple? You know there is no such thing as a popular national vote, right? It's literally unconstitutional... or against the actual defined constitutional process. But "close enough" for you?

The popular vote in each state is how the states, individually, selects electors to the Electoral College.

The most direct path to the presidency remains the popular vote.

I would feel a lot better going into an election believing I had the majority of the poplar vote.

A couple million votes across certain states more than Hillary Clinton, with all else being the same, and VP Harris wins.

quote:

Originally posted by theback40:
I disagree with the term dark knight, Kabob.
A knight has a code and ethics. Even a dark knight would have them, albeit, aligned to a different kingdom. Hence the term dark knight.
Trump has neither a code or ethics, and just could not be a knight of any sort.

I see your point, TB40, and don't disagree. It's a good point.

I used the term Dark Knight for several reasons. One is because Trump thinks of himself as a warrior of sorts, fight -fight, and declares himself such.

He presents himself as fighting for a cause, aside from his amorality and aside from the morality of the means or the end. He is aligned to a different kingdom, so to speak, while we're making analogies.

Trump represents a form of nihilism. He's an avatar for the moral decline of the nation. He didn't cause it, in the cause-and-effect scheme. He's the effect. He's the exploiter, the opportunist. He emerged because the conditions were favorable for his type.

His vision for the nation and otherwise is dark. Dark cannot offer light, only contrast.

Have you seen the movie No Country for Old Men?

https://moviemezzanine.com/no-...y-for-old-men-essay/

https://filmspeak.net/features...-cosmic-indifference

I know this represents an extreme, but the main character has a code, a cause, even though he's amoral. He moves through the world that surrounds him by a code of his own making, despite the world.

Trump's code is a combination of his character and his interpretation of the world surrounding him. The difference with Trump is that he has the ability to turn alt-reality into reality.

quote:

Originally posted by LHeym500:
The popular vote in each state is how the states, individually, selects electors to the Electoral College.

The most direct path to the presidency remains the popular vote.

I would feel a lot better going into an election believing I had the majority of the poplar vote.

A couple million votes across certain states more than Hillary Clinton, with all else being the same, and VP Harris wins.

Nothing you said is wrong

You kind of skipped over the ec voting and the house certifying the ec votes

The House does not certify.
Certification is done by both chambers in joint session presided over by the seating VP.

The Supreme Court has upheld state laws that bind electors obtained by the state’s popular vote to that popular vote.

Electors are no longer free, if they ever were, to buck the state’s popular vote.

When the joint session of Congress certifies the election, what they are doing is counting the electoral college vote.

That is why Eastman and Trump’s scheme centered on the Vice President preventing this “count” and sending the electors back to the states, certain states, to be replaced.

If Trump has a code, that is a big if, he will change it when he gets up in the morning to benefit himself. remember, he was a dem before a Repub.

If you lot have gotten the idea yet, that all Trump thinks about, dreams about, is Trump!

Everyone else is just a tool!

Chameleons have a code.

Many GOPer politicians have a Chameleon Code - Vance is a good example - Graham, Cruz, and several others.

Chameleons do not have a code. That is anthropomorphic BS.
All reptiles care about is moderating body temp, eating, and at the right time, reproducing. All while exerting the least amount of energy. In other words, survival.
I found a snapping turtle with an infected eye. Took it home, squirted penn in the eye, never picked her up or startled her. Before the month I kept her ended, she would take lettuce or a night crawler out of my hand. I could run my finger around her beak. It was easy living and no threat to her, thats all a reptile cares about, and she responded that way.

TB40,

I'm not talking about literal chameleons.

I'm making a comparison, or analogy re political chameleons, like Vance, etc.

Anyway, I appreciate your opinions.