I’m going to guess the whole thing may be borne from
- some resentment over water restrictions affecting the golf club he owns in Palos Verdes (@FloridaManJefe alluded to it).
- &/or that he’s a dingus.
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While I can see it as a symptom of becoming addle-brained, it also serves as a reminder to his racist followers: “A black man was president. Vote for me and I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again.” Even if he is addled, it could just be he used to be better at remembering to not be quite so blatant about the racist part, but he can stop holding back even as loosely as he was – it’s been proven that it only makes him more popular with his base.
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Yeah, I think it absolutely functions that way, but I don’t even think it’s at all calculated or deliberate on his part - it’s an accident, a product of his own addled, racist brain. Obama humiliated him at the correspondent’s dinner, and Trump’s whole political career has been about taking down Obama - except he couldn’t, because he couldn’t run against him. As a result, every Democrat he runs against becomes a stand-in for Obama in his head. Sometimes he can’t help but have that idea leak out, when he talks. This coincidentally is supported by/feeds into Trump’s followers seeing him as the anti-Obama, the white supremacist president who will undo Obama’s legacy, though. And since his followers probably talk about Obama a lot, it contributes to Trump’s mental confusion.
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I see it as both if for no other reason, when he makes any bigoted comment, he gets rewarded (cheers and applause) which only reinforces that random brain cell firing that makes him say that in the first place. Even if it is random babbling, he’s quite aware of what he’s doing: Trump Checks Crowd Over ‘Crazy’ Ovation: You ‘Didn’t Know’ About This 5 Years Ago
Note: That one was about trans people, but I promise it’s not the only bigoted rally flag he’s waving and knows it.
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Yeah, it’s been clear from the start that much of Trump’s “strategy” is basically dumb-AI reinforcement learning of “say random things, then repeat - with variation - whatever got positive feedback.” Occasionally I think he says nonsensical things because he’s convinced they’re actually clever points that prove his argument, despite the feedback, though (i.e. the nonsense about needing ID to buy bread - I can’t believe audiences are giving him positive feedback, but he’s repeated that one a number of times).
This doesn’t feel like he’s been positively reinforced, however - instead, he seems to have lost the audience, they’re more confused than anything, when he starts calling Biden (and Hillary) “Obama” (or confuses Jeb with George W Bush). So when he does it, it just seems like a slip. He’s kind of hesitant, too, when he normally spouts nonsense confidently - a sign that he realizes, on some level, that he’s saying the wrong thing, but can’t quite, in the moment, figure out what it is.
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I hear or read this cited a lot inferring it’s the impetus for his hatred of Obama, but he’d been pushing the birther thing forever before that.
Would T have behaved any differently if he hadn’t been lightly roasted?
I kind of think no. He still would’ve dedicated himself to dismantling Obama’s legacy because he’s a racist asshole.
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Sure, but then Obama hit back, and that was just not acceptable. Trump very well could have been on the same trajectory to the presidency if it hadn’t happened (certainly he was already into the racist, authoritarian bullshit, but he seemed happy to snipe from the sidelines), but that seemed to tip him over the edge he was skating on. At the very least it added motivation to actually run himself.
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