Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
My theory has always been that Donald Trump doesn't care about anyone. Don't read that as "he hates everyone because he's a narcissist." He has a perfectly neutral with no priors feeling towards literally every human on earth.
Pair that with the fact that he's is, first and foremost, a walking one-on-one charisma machine. He's adopted this so deeply that it permeates his very speech. "Everyone is saying X is the best X ever, no one's ever seen anything like it!" ... "We're going to do Y and we're going to do it so well that it's the best thing that will ever happen." These are almost carnival barker levels of over-the-top flattery and positivity. The reason they exist as verbal artifacts in Trump's lexicon is because he's been practicing them day in and day out for 40+ years. It's reflexive at this point.
When he sat down next to Obama, he had some factual details in his mind about the man. Probably not many. He had, again, zero prior esteem estimations. So, he just started to plug in the few fats he knew about Obama into his CharismaLLM.exe and let it roll - because this is what he does with every single person he talks to directly. (Major caveat: Rally speeches and press conference Trump is different. Everything I am saying here only applies to one on one or maybe small group conversations).
Where it gets interesting is that Obama, the vaunted "orator" (although I think he was DRASTICALLY overrated as a speaker) was far less than charismatic one on one. He wanted to argue about policy in the way a Harvard Law professor would; dueling papers. Instead of doing the hard but necessary work of politicking - you know, the thing he was elected to do.
As much as I think Trump doesn't really care about other humans one-on-one (reread the intro paragraph!) I think Obama is deeply offended and angered by Trump's intuitive understanding of politics and people. This is quite literally the bookish nerd watching the bombastic class president shit all over his "legacy".
In short, I believe that, deep down, Obama thinks Trump is cool.
It was sort of amazing to see Obama get bullied into releasing his long form BC after years of birtherism conspiracy shilling by Trump
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