Trump is flubbing his panicky pre-debate reversal of characterizing President Biden as a driveling halfwit. At a rally last week "he openly wrestled with the obvious question: What if Mr. Biden clears the very low bar that Mr. Trump has now set for him?" writes The Times.
For that the challenger had a ready answer for the assembled. Should Biden clear the bar, explained Trump, his otherwise inexplicable achievement will be owed to being "pumped up" on cocaine, kept stashed away in the White House, Q.E.D.
Another excuse combined two of Trump's dearest defense mechanisms, admixed with a scattergun offense: paranoia and victimization. Both are designed for self-casting a heroic image of the lone fighter inveighing against dark and powerful forces, aligned and conspiratorial.
He swinishly squealed all three routines to the gathered's sow's ears so they'd understand the debate's anti-him rigging. The upshot was that he'll face not one opponent but a hostile threesome, a now-wily Biden and CNN's vicious Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.
The Times observed, though Trump didn't, that "his campaign negotiated the terms of his participation." Thus his on-stage disembowelment would be the charge-of-the-lightest-brigade result. The Daily Beast's Matt Lewis adds, "For a party that fetishizes fighting and winning, it’s unfathomable why they tolerate someone who does so much whining and losing."
So far not flubs, only his polished demagoguery and customary warping of our cosmic local politics.
The bungling includes his recent boast of acing a cognitive test when president. Cognition counter-indicated was naming the test's ministering physician. "Doc Ronny!" he blared."Doc Ronny Johnson!” — Johnson being Jackson.
The Times related another bungle as a "bollix," which contrarily strikes me as insignificant and better overlooked. "I don’t say clean fakes, although they do," groused Trump at the rally. "The videos of Crooked Joe shuffling around are clean fakes. Do you know what a clean fake is?"
Likely not, neither his peeps nor we, since no such fake exists. He meant "cheap fake," malignly AV-edited footage. But c'mon, man, I'm skeptical of even 1% of Americans knowing anything definitionally accurate about fakes, whether "cheap" or AI-created "deep."
Still, of all would-be fanciful editors, Trump should have known. My "bollix" objection is that when put against the insipidity of his recently extended, shark=fearing monologue — some of which he repeated at the rally — I say print's devoted space to things "clean" is space more profitably used in amplifying on Trump's enormously abnormal and presidentially unfit mind.
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