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Your last and biggest black pill to take is "no, they literally don't remember anything the TV doesn't remind them of every five minutes"
Good news: it's a suppository.
There won't be any cognitive dissonance because there's no cognition, and there's no use waiting for it to kick in any moment now, even as the propaganda ramps up to new heights of hysteria.
I keep having to remind myself of that one. But it is less well defined than you're making it out to be. The past is forgotten until is is specifically brought back. And in this case we have the Trump campaign fully able to do this. This isn't government propaganda, it's campaigning in an election.
In that context they have to consider what rhetorical weapons they're handing over to the other side by positioning themselves in this way.
So I'm trying to figure out why they're opening themselves up for that. Do they really thing that either Trump won't go for those attacks or did they not even consider it?
You mean Trump was in some kind of a treaty to not use "my opponents are weird and gross" rhetorical superweapons?
The kind of people Trump is needing to convince to vote for him are those who want to know if he's able to act dignified. While Trump is certainly no stranger to unprompted personal attacks against the other side and its supporters, right now he's got the assassination attempt and the lawfare giving him that more dignified aura. He's managed to genuinely appear like a martyr, whose liberty and even his very life is under attack all because he has the courage to stand up for his people.
The Harris campaign is trying to drag him back down to his usual name-calling tactics, but if they exaggerate their case and make their attacks too vicious and too centered on supporters (as opposed to right wing politicians/leaders) then the electorate might give him a free pass to retaliate.
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Because J.D. Vance's weirdness, whether it's banning abortion, attacking childless women, and the various stuff included in Project 2025 and so on is something median voters care about. They don't care about transgender issues or whatever the Culture War issue of the day really is, as the 2022 midterms showed, when even GOP voters put it at the bottom of their concerns.
Transgender issues are very important to Republican's and centrists who still live in deep blue cities or your typical reactionary Christian's who hate all social liberalism, but the median swing voter in Wisconsin doesn't give a damn, whether they do end up voting for Trump or Kamala in the end, and actually, focusing on transgender issues as your comeback will just make you look more weird.
The median voter's view is, "look, I don't get it, but why are you so obsessed with it, weirdo?"
As someone from Wisconsin, who knows my fair share of swing voters, they absolutely do give a damn. There are plenty of people who aren't diehard for one party or the other, but who find transgender stuff to be fairly off-putting.
The inherent disgust reaction is one of the most powerful emotions humans have. For some, it’s triggered by women showing their penises in locker rooms, for others it’s would-be rapists touching women’s bodies with their words.
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Eh leftists always try the “it’s just so weird and creepy you care so much about this. Who even notices the race of characters in Lord of the Rings”? When provably the left notices and cares a whole damn lot about exactly this sort of thing. This is a typical female social shaming tactic.
I've seen a number of people notice this, and prescribe as the counter-argument "then let me win." If it's such a trivial non-issue, if it's so not worth caring about, let alone fighting over, then why not just surrender the point and let the other side get their way?
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So that's it, the gamble is that Trump ignores it and focuses on the economy, so it's a freebie that will warrant no retaliation?
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There's a lot of irony being told "why are you so obsessed with it" by people who rush out to buy each new version of the LGBT-BLM-weird-circle-&-pawprint-now-for-some-reason flag, who wear "protect trans kids" shirts with knife logos, who get their harry potter scar tattoos covered over with devotional slogans like some born-again Aryan Nations member.
But there's no point in pointing out this irony, because the disgusting juvenile sneering isn't a real belief, just self-aware, calculated bullying.
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