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Notes -
I'm by no means a fan of Donald Trump, and if I was an American citizen there's no question in my mind that I would've voted for Hillary in 2016. But regardless of my opinion of Trump's politics, his authoritarian tendencies, his disregard for principles, his emotional incontinence etc., credit where credit is due - the man is a remarkably compelling public speaker. I watched the first ten minutes of the podcast, having never watched Joe Rogan before, and I was riveted. People used to say that Johnny Cash could read the phonebook and make it interesting - I think I could listen to Trump go off on weird tangents about his real estate ventures and Lincoln for an hour and not feel like my time was wasted. This is not the rambling of a senile old man suffering from the onset of dementia: this is an extremely practiced, keenly honed skill. He knows exactly what he's doing.
Obviously the job of being a compelling public speaker and the job of being President are very different things, and I am confident that skill in the former is only very weakly correlated with skill in the latter. But to the extent that it's correlated at all - well, it's a skill that Trump and Obama have, Kamala and Hillary don't have, and that Biden probably had at one point but no longer has. Kamala appearing on the Rogan podcast would have been an awkward, unproductive and uncomfortable experience for everyone involved, and I'm sure everyone involved knows this, up to and including Kamala herself. If Kamala's campaign manager had made an appearance on the podcast, he or she would have come off better than Kamala herself.
As a point of fascination with Trump I'm not really sure if he knows exactly what he's doing or he's just an entity who has gone through enough selection pressure to emerge as a thing that naturally does this kinda stuff.
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