I didn’t mean to accuse you of overthinking. I was merely trying to emphasize that Trump doesn’t think. Or at least on the rare occasions that he does, we get things like “drink bleach.” For the most part, he merely reacts. Worse, he is reflexively contrary to any kind of expertise. And he gets away with that just often enough that he thinks that he is genius.
I think that the assumption that got us here is that things are already so bad that they couldn’t get worse, so why not get somebody to tear everything down. I suspect that is why the polling was so wrong in 2016. The adjustments that pollsters do for “likely voters” is going to tend to ignore the opinions of the nihilists that he appeals to because they normally don’t vote.
The idea that he could get reelected after one of the worst presidencies in history is shocking and terrifying to me.
Yeah, no, Trump doesn’t exactly present himself like someone who actually thinks he’s innocent. He knows he’s not. He still rages and throws ketchup when he’s caught before he starts claiming nobody has ever been so unfairly targeted.
What he actually acts like is someone who thinks he can get away with things through force and intimidation. First and foremost he’s a bully. A dumb bully, sure, but that doesn’t change much for his victims…or all the people who like bullying, who are his real support.
I think it might be a case of his usual rush to bin/bucket/prejudge based on (perceived) group identity. Thinking about Ukraine and Russia as being different is more complicated an idea than deciding that all them peoples is Russkies. I think it goes along with his racism, deciding that all you should really need to know about a person is their ethnicity.
Fundamentally it’s laziness, which it hurts me to say, because I’m lazy.
Well from all appearances, he is amoral and does not believe in right and wrong. He sees things in terms of winners and losers. People that obey the laws even if they wouldn’t get caught are just chumps. He doesn’t believe that he has done anything wrongper se. He IS more crooked than most business men, but then most businessmen are more crooked that people realize. Many of the financial shenanigans that he engages in are “normal” even if they are illegal. It’s kind of like the guy that gets pulled over for doing 80 miles an hour and complains that it’s unfair because everybody speeds (although more like 10 mph over) and that he only got pulled over because he’s in a red car. He may or may not realize that the did the crime, but he doesn’t believe that he has done anything wrong.
Alternative hypothesis: Trump knows it’s wrong and likes that he gets away with things to gratify his own ego. Like how he used to make a game of trying to sleep with other people’s wives.
Convenient, I guess?
