Politico has a follow-up article on last September's New York Times report detailing the unsuccessful efforts of conservative anti-Trump PAC
Too many liberals in bubbles have this peculiar view of US politics that it's supposed to be like the Oxford Debating Society where the person with the soundest argument wins.
Such people need to quit watching reruns of "The West Wing" on auto-repeat. đđ¤Łđ
Whether you like it or not, if you are personally attacked by your opponent then the most effective thing is to hit back in kind twice as hard. That's what needs to happen to Trump.
And nobody is as vulnerable to personal attacks as Donald Trump. Late night comics and political cartoonists did more to defeat Donald Trump's re-election bid than all the terabytes of position papers and political analyses combined.
As I argued last time around, the best hope may lie in messages that Win It Back hasn't been as eager to test. They must strip him of the strongman persona he tries so hard to create: Use ads that portray him as a laughingstock and paint his supporters as chumps. Make it embarrassing to support Trumpâso that wearing a MAGA hat in public feels like wearing an advertisement for your favorite hemorrhoid cream. Trump's been walking right into that potential trap in recent weeks by delivering rally speeches that sound like complete gibberish, peppered with verbal flubs that Fox News would base entire news cycles around if it were a Democrat making the gaffe. Any ad campaign looking to prove Trump to be a bumbling clown clinging only tenuously to his own persona would have ample material to work with. Republican primary voters don't mind that Trump tried to overthrow the government, because Republican primary voters think that, well, maybe they ought to be able to do that if Black Americans keep insisting on their rights or if Fox News throws up another B-reel of migrants wading across the southern border to ask for asylum. But Republican primary voters do careâa lotâthat so much of the rest of the country considers them to be muleheaded saps.
You might think that all the voters have seen all the derisive stuff about Trump. But not everybody has the same media menu that we do.
Of course the hardcore MAGA cultists will stick with Trump even if he personally poops the digested remnants of well-done steak with ketchup on them. But there are some squishy backers who are just going along for the ride. And there are also low information voters who don't pay a lot of attention to politics who need to know that Trump is an unstable crackpot who kept classified nuclear secrets in boxes next to his toilet.
The more personal, the better â though such interjections probably need to have at least a small grain of truth in them so they can't be completely refuted.
With numerous elections in states that are decided by less than two percent of the vote, every little bit helps. Just referring to Trump as a "nut" may go a lot further with some people than a long-winded explanation of how his poor response to the COVID-19 emergency led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a terrible hit on the US economy.
Nobody wants to be associated with a loser. Making personal fun of Trump in various ways will go far if done propitiously.
