Trump's bag of tricks comes up empty against Biden

[brooklynite]

Politico

On a Saturday in late July, Rudy Giuliani was having lunch with Donald Trump at the president’s golf course in Virginia. Both men were in unusually good spirits. Giuliani, the president’s sometimes lawyer who is representing Trump in negotiations over the presidential debates, was happy to again be having regular face time with the president after months of coronavirus-related isolation.

Trump, who has been glum about the still-raging pandemic that has killed nearly 160,000 Americans, the subsequent economic collapse, polling that suggests he’s headed for defeat in the fall, and his inability to arrest the slide, was buoyed by a good round on the links. “He did very well at golf,” Giuliani said in a lengthy interview with POLITICO over the weekend. “So that might have been why he was in a good mood.”

Naturally the conversation turned to the general election and how Trump might turn things around. Republicans have been bombarding Trump with advice, arguing that his insistence on stoking the same divisive issues — white resentment of minorities, the culture wars, and “LAW & ORDER” — that worked so well for him in 2016 appeal only to the Trump diehards and have turned off a broad majority of the country.

“It used to be that he would do five rallies a day and say whatever came off the top of his head and he thinks that won him the election,” said a senior GOP congressional aide, echoing the sentiments of a still-intact class of Republicans appalled by Trump and how he is turning vast swaths of Republican-leaning suburbs into Democratic territory. “It’s like when a 25-year old gets drunk and shows up at a family engagement. That can be cute. But if you’re a 50-year-old and you show up at the gathering drunk and embarrassing, that just hits a little differently. It’s not cute anymore.”

[qwlauren35]

1. Must be a Republican thing.

I cannot imagine anyone, age 25 or 50, in my family arriving drunk at a family function. And if they did, someone would probably find them a taxi and send them home, or somehow try to manage them.

NO ONE in my family would consider it cute, 25 or 50.

[lagomorph777]

3. I guess that's how larval Republicans behave.

[Mike 03]

2. Amusing paragraph:

In early May, Brad Parscale, then Trump’s campaign manager, bragged that he had spent three years building a “Death Star” and “n a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time.” It was an unfortunate turn of phrase as Trump actually fired Parscale two months later and replaced him with his deputy Bill Stepien. Like the Meadows regime, the unveiling of the Death Star also coincided with Biden’s steady rise in the polls.

[lagomorph777]

4. Apparently Brad's aim was off.

He blew up Planet Parscale.

[GopherGal]

5. Did he SEE Star Wars?

I suppose he arrived drunk and fell asleep before part where the farm boy in the X-Wing blasted the mighty Death Star into a million pieces.

[meow2u3]

6. Does "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" ring a bell

Trump conned a large number of Americans outside New York with his overpromising and not even bothering to deliver. If he thinks he can fool all of us all the time because he can trick his most rabid cult followers, he has another thing coming.

As Honest Abe Lincoln put it: You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all the people some of the time. Bt you cannot fool all the people all of the time.