Make it make sense
The job of any political analyst is to help you make sense of what’s going on. But how do you do that when nothing makes sense? We have a major party presidential nominee who spends his rallies praising a fictional serial killer as if he were real, spent the debate yelling things like “They’re eating the dogs,” and just spent the weekend declaring “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
There’s a tendency to say that, well, if someone has gotten this far, they must on some level know what they’re doing. This has to be part of a strategy. There must be some plan here. No matter how evil or deranged or even inept the plan may be, there has to be a plan, right? I’m here to tell you there’s not.
There’s no strategy involved when a presidential candidate spends a debate falsely claiming that immigrants are eating people’s pets. You know how we know this? If there were a strategy with this, we’d be seeing it playing out. If Trump had gone up in the polls after the debate, we’d have to say that perhaps he outsmarted us and really did manage to win over additional voters by yelling “They’re eating the dogs.” But that didn’t happen. All he did was fall a little further behind, while handing his opponent a soundbite that she’ll be able to spend the rest of the election cycle using against him.
All that happened here was that a politically clueless JD Vance tried pushing a fake story that he should have known would backfire, and then a dementia-riddled Trump also ran with the story because he thinks every absurd thing he hears is real. Eight years ago Trump was strategically making up phony racist conspiracy theories to try to win over braindead voters. Now Trump is so deep into senility, he believes all the racist conspiracy theories, and thinks he has to warn everyone about it. Trump has now become the kind of addled individual he used to try to manipulate.
Nor is there any strategy involved when a presidential candidate yells “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” Trump is already struggling badly with the youth vote, and now he’s motivated a whole lot more young people to go out and vote against him. For them it’s not even necessarily about defending Taylor Swift. Not every young person likes Taylor Swift’s music. But when an eighty year old presidential candidate is out there attacking Taylor Swift, it’s a good way to signal to young people that there’s something disqualifyingly wrong with this guy.
So no, there’s no way for any analyst to make sense of what Donald Trump is doing right now, because there’s no sense to what he’s doing. He’s a deeply addled person who’s now suffering from severe cognitive problems on top of his lifelong psychoses, and the result is that he’s self destructing. That doesn’t mean we can sit back and assume we’ll win. We still have to put in the work and run up the score. But we don’t have to worry about trying to decipher the logic behind Trump’s actions. Because there simply isn’t any. Anyone who claims Trump has a strategy is trying to sell you on something that isn’t there.
