It’s all performative - make up a fake “threat” to America, come up with performative “solutions” that you’re seen enacting (but don’t actually care about).
I was reading someone claiming that Trump’s populism (which has spread, to some degree, to other MAGA candidates) wasn’t just empty performance, that the populist positions worked to alienate the big-money backers of the party, and that if Trump (et al) dropped them, it wouldn’t hurt their support. Which may be true, but the total lack of coherent policy to advance those populist positions signals to the money that they’re not serious, and Trump doesn’t base his positions on some highly optimized strategy based on evidence, but his own feelings (which are sometimes delusional) and the immediate feedback from his rallies. Everything he does, outside of feeding his narcissism, is totally performative with no policy positions he actually believes in.
Is it a Trump nickname (as opposed to “Sleepy Joe”)?
I mean…
