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It's unfalsifiable because the evidence that would prove or disprove election fraud was illegally destroyed. Ballot chains of custody were destroyed across several swing states. You can recount the ballots as many times as you want but you can't prove where any of those ballots came from. This is after several swing states simultaneously stopped counting on Election Day only to return massive pro-Biden dumps at 6am a few hours later.
This will sound unbearably demented to most posters here, and I'm aware of that, and fine with this, because I mean it earnestly: all talk of Trump's "shortfalls" is nonsense. Trump is obviously one of the greatest Americans to ever live. He spurred the renaissance of New York, mastered reality TV, turned his fathers modest real estate portfolio into a multi-billion dollar company synonymous with wealth as one of the most famous people to ever exist, then ran for president as a private citizen despite major opposition from both parties and won. He casually reinvents the language every time he speaks. He tried to do a denuclearization deal with Russia and China, we were literally on the cusp of world peace, and we couldn't get there because of the Russia hoax. Fundamentally we aren't good enough for Donald Trump. We were all sitting around debating the doom of Western Civilization and pro-woke and anti-woke and he's the only guy to stand up and say, we have all these factories lying around, we should turn them on, we should make Detroit wealthy again, we should make San Francisco a paradise again, we should Make America Great Again, and going further than that we should Make America Greater Than Ever Before. He just did it casually, because he wanted to help his country, when he was full of success and worldly things. (Multibillionaire, supermodel wife, luxury real estate empire, grandchildren and kids.) And we sit around debating things like his tone and his shortfalls because, I guess, people have told so many lies about him that we cynically believe some of them have to be true.
Trump is unfathomably based for not dropping the 2020 election. Anyone else would have let themselves be bullied out of it. Anyone else would have quietly dropped the issue and made a nice conciliatory speech and walked away beat. But Washington DC is governed by a fundamentally sick culture where the wealth of the greatest country in the world is spent making the world a worser place. There is immense pressure within the system, all the time, to pillage everything for the wealth of the people running it, bomb some more countries for the defense contracts, ruin the world for the price it cost to ruin, then pay the experts to sell their misconceptions as the smartest ideas on earth. It takes immense pressure to not cave and do something good. Most presidents only do it a few times. Trump did it over and over and over again, more than anybody, even up to the point of this most important thing. They stole the election from him and he refused to concede it, even as they accused him of destroying democracy.
That's why he's going to win too, and why he won in 2016 (and 2020 alike). It's the quality from that first Republican debate in 2016, when Trump stood on stage and was the only candidate to say he wouldn't pledge to endorse the Republican nom.
Trump is the only candidate. He's the only one actually willing to stand up and fight. We all forgot what it even looked like to fight, we were all living in a world of sitting around waiting for Caesar and collapse and depression and loss, waiting and watching and coping. He makes it look easy! "Moderating" wouldn't help. All his "shortfalls" are his best qualities and why he is in fact The Best and will win at all. While we were sitting around passively debating the death of America he was imagining making America Greater Than Ever Before. You just come down the escalator, and you fight, and you win, and it's easy. And then you win some more.
Come on! He's clearly one of the greatest of the WORLD if not the greatest.
Soon we will all be talking trumps english
Right, but Americans are already the greatest in the world, it goes without saying.
Your logic is sound
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In what sense did he actually achieve - or even try to achieve - any of this?
There was minimal change in the trajectory of the manufacturing sector under Trump - there was a period of reasonable growth about the same as periods of growth under Obama in length and magnitude, stagnating in early 2019 before Covid made the numbers meaningless - and even after Covid corrections Biden also had a similar period of growth - slightly shorter but slightly faster - before stagnating similarly to Trump. What policy of Trump's was even supposed to achieve this? Tariffs is the only obvious candidate, but they came only in fits and starts and provoked a wide range of retaliatory tariffs. It doesn't matter though because clearly it didn't affect much either way.
If the answer to all this is that he wanted to achieve more but was thwarted by Congress/the Judiciary/Democrats/Republicans/the Deep State, then sorry but that's politics, maybe he isn't very good at it. Everyone agrees when Freddie De Boer says this to the left, but it's equally true for the right.
Shifting the vibes is by far the most important economic contributor. Talking about lower taxes and then not lowering them will likely bring in far more revenue than talking about raising taxes and then not raising them.
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Except for, when, you know, you lose. And then you fight to argue that you didn't lose, and you lose that fight too.
Losing big is a part of winning big. Tom Brady lost at the Superbowl quite a few times, does that make him a loser? I think it's small-souled to look at a streak of big wins and cynically posture about failures and risk. Trump lost and then he kept fighting, which is the most important quality, which is that nice TV cliche that everybody talks about and no one really believes. His bankruptcies (large) set the stage for even greater success. That's the price of the game. But you just come down the escalator and fight and win and it's easy. And then you win some more. That's the attitude it takes to to imagine making America Greater Than Ever Before. It's the progressive forward-minded happy warrior (joy) that can imagine not just winning but winning more than anyone has ever thought possible. It's a big boast, it's uncouth and earnest and ridiculous. And it's the only way to really believe in the future, to unabashedly manifest a new golden age.
in my opinion trump should keep fighting about election fraud if he's correct, and not if he's wrong. the election fraud discourse over the past few years has both been, as far as i can tell, objectively very wrong, it's a classic example of a "conspiracy theory". IMO "conspiracy theory" is a very poor name, and what people really mean with that word isn't that something's a theory about a grand conspiracy, but a pattern of poor reasoning that leads certain types of people to wild, dramatic, and false conclusions. the election fraud isn't a "conspiracy theory" because it'd require a bunch of democrats to conspire to rig the election - that could totally happen! - it's a "conspiracy theory" because the reasoning people use to support it is of the kind people use to claim JFK vaccine CIA aliens.
the reason we have a lot of service workers, and not a lot of factory workers, is that the production of cheap consumer goods has gotten really efficient, and people (including you) would rather pay money for good service at a restaurant, or enjoyable content delivered via the internet, than for more cheap consumer goods. infinity percent tariffs on cars would not revitalize detroit!
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Losing leads to winning when you use it as an opportunity to learn and grow.
Trump did that with his bankruptcies. He repositioned his businesses. He learned that Trump the brand was valuable, and leveraged that by going into simple businesses and using his name to increase the margin on them.
He didn't continue in a series of endless lawsuits against his creditors, claiming that the casinos were in fact entirely solvent and making tons of money.
I appreciate your point, but I continue to believe that Trump and Republicans as a whole would have done better to take the attitude typical of a team that loses a game on a bad call or an unlucky injury: we lost, but it doesn't reflect on us as a team, we're going to come back and win. Much as it pains me to give this example, the 49ers in 2022 lost to the Eagles in the NFCCG on terrible luck. Brock Purdy suffered a freak elbow injury on a sack in the first quarter, and their backup QB suffered a concussion a few plays later. Left with no quarterbacks, the 49ers were doomed. And the Niners maintained, to themselves and publicly, that while they lost the game they were the better team. And they came back in 2023 on a mission, demolished the Eagles in the regular season, and ran hot all the way to the Super Bowl. Which they lost to the Chiefs, but what are you gonna do?
If Republicans had collectively taken the attitude that the various rule changes had delivered a Biden presidency, but not a fully legitimate Biden presidency, and that in recognition of this Biden should limit his programs to change the country, and if he didn't then Republicans in Congress had a mandate to prevent him from doing so. That's a sophisticated, effective argument that would appeal to moderates. The alternative has lead to significant losses of winnable Senate and Gubernatorial races, that are likely to hobble the effectiveness of a second Trump term.
They cheated! This kind of "sophisticated" klaptrap is a losing argument, because it's not earnest, it's not real. You can't honestly believe that they cheated (that's declasse, that's gauche), it's naive to really believe something so simple, so let's make up this complicated elaboration so that there's ironic distance to keep us all healthy and detached. They didn't cheat, they just changed the rules in unaccountable and unprecedent ways that felt like cheating, but technically I'm not calling it cheating because I don't want to cast aspersions about the process, which I'm casting aspersions about, but in a "sophisticated" way (insert crying seethejak under a happy mask).
If they stole the election from Trump, and Trump didn't say they cheated, but made some "sophisticated" complicated argument full of triangulationg, people would be pissed! They would have lost all faith in Trump. He wouldn't have just lost a few "winnable Senate and Gubernatorial races," he would have been exiled from the party. The GOP would have learned that Trump has no teeth, and they would have felt happy screwing him out of a third nomination.
Meanwhile Trump has learned the lessons from 2020 -- there are huge Republican orgs now dedicated to training poll watchers and lawyers undoing the rule changes and votes. Trump actually knows a thing or two about this.
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