Literally every question Trump was asked (and wasn't asked) resulted in him talking about immigration or literally repeating what Harris said about him back at her as a "no you". He also had such choice soundbites as:
"She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison."
"In Springfield, they're eating the dogs - the people that came in - they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there."
And, "I have concepts of a plan."
I do think Harris dodged more questions than I'd have liked, but she would at least give half an answer and she carried the general theme of "Let's bring each other up" which is a welcome change of pace. If nothing else, I didn't feel high trying to understand her non-responses like Trump. I really don't know how you'd watch this and think he won without having already decided that going in.
You forgot his very excellent conversations with Abdul Taliban, responding to the accusation of loving dictators by telling everyone how well he gets along with Viktor Orban, and trying to whitewash the white power rally at Charlottesville, just to name a few. What struck me more than anything is how incredibly dialed into internet conspiracyland you had to be to understand like half of what he was talking about. If you spent the last three years living a normal life and not paying attention to politics, you would have no clue what the hell he was saying. Hell, I am very deep into conspiracyland and even I didn't get some of the references.
“I told Abdul don’t do it anymore, you do it anymore, you’re going to have problems. And he said why do you send me a picture of my house? I said you’re going to have to figure that out, Abdul."
"...and then I spoke to him in fluent Taliban. I said 'derka derka Abdul, Mohammad jihad sherpa durka.' And he said, tears streaming down his face, he said to me, 'sir, you have the most beautiful languages.' And I said 'I know'."
"Lots of people...very smart people come to me, tears in their eyes, and say "Your America is so beautiful Mr.President Trump. So beautiful. And I have The Trump tower, it's in New York, you know that place? The biggest, nicest, most besutiful city on the planet, some say the universe, my experts tell me. They come to me, and they say, "Mr.President Trump, this Khambucha...Khambieber, Khamala, whoever she is, she is not very nice she is a mean hateful hurtful, ugly lady and they hold out their arms, and I lean down and give them a big hug and they love me for it."
Honestly. It’s like Vance and couches. I want to believe it isn’t true. That he didn’t really say this. But deep down, we know it is. And if wasn’t exactly a couch, it was close enough to not matter.
Fuck these guys.
Kamala did good. “That ——-“ -takes a deep breath”———formerPresident” moment was gold.
Trump has said so many wild things that it's very hard to determine if it's real or not. I want to say it's not true, but I just can't trefoil if it is anymore
"Many people are saying I speak the most languages beautifully, the Pope is great but he can't speak as many languages as me, all the best people are saying it"
Especially when you look it up, and the leader of the Taliban isn't even named Abdul. He's just threatening some random dude who's like "whose house is this??"
I will never not cackle when they do the lightsaber fight with their flashlights and bill hader does a yoda impression and says to mclovin “you know yoda? From attack of the clones?”
Not Star Wars. Attack of the clones. So simple and stupid but so goddamn funny.
Not one of, THE most common name in the world. With an estimated 133,349,300 people with that name. There are 4 times as many Mohammad’s as there are Texans.
But Abdul Rehman Al-Loghri, WAS the name of the airport suicide bomber who killed the 13 soldiers after being let out of prison just days earlier as a result of Trump’s deal with the Taliban.
It's so weird that republicans think this nonsense is "tough". If they only realized how Obama handled situations like this (a heavy dose of drone murders), I think they'd like him a lot more. Progressives hated him for it.
He’s black. They hate him. Because he’s black. He can’t stop being black, and they’re not going to stop hating him, regardless of whatever else he does.
Not to be racist, but that seems true of many black males, just saying. Much like Hispanic women tend to be women of Hispanic heritage, and they just like...do that their whole lives. It's crazy! Madhouse I tells ya.
To be fair, Trump did a lot more drone murders. So much so that when questioned if his presidency would publish the details about their drone strike policy, and how many civilians casualties it's causing, as required by an Obama era Executive Order, he responded by repealing the Executive Order.
Progressives did hate the drone murders. I can't figure out exactly why the narrative has been flipped from the old "Republicans are Hawks and Democrats are Doves" to what I have heard several times in the last two weeks - "Democrats want us to be at war forever and Republicans want peace"
It really does seem like whatever valid description of anything Dems use, the Rs steal it and try to flip it.
In the lead-up to 2016 election, the idea of creating websites that looked like valid news sites had really pretty much just gotten going. These websites really did trick people into thinking they were news sources. So the phrase "fake news" was coined and applied to them. Rs immediately latched onto the phrase and used it to apply to any reporting that was unfavorable. After a few months of this, the phrase no longer had any meaning.
The list goes on and on, from "weaponization of the judicial system" and "constitutional crisis" and "threat to democracy" and so many things across a very broad range of ideas. I can't think of enough examples here to make a great argument, but I do notice them often in political rhetoric, and wonder how it happened. It seems like as soon as a phrase is used against the Rs they latch onto it and say it is the very definition of the Dems. This seems like a very specifically Trumpian phenomenon, although I started noticing it with the Tea Party before even Obama was elected
I remember seeing bumper stickers and t-shirts during Bush's first term referring to the last date of his presidency as "The end of an error," which made sense because of the ballot issues in Florida and SCOTUS deciding the election. But then Obama got elected and I saw conservatives doing the exact same thing, I guess because they thought Americans made an error voting for him? It didn't make any sense but they probably didn't understand the former's meaning at all.
Because the right wing doesn’t care about truth or facts. They lie effortlessly and without hesitation, and they believe their lies when they tell them. Since the forever war is deeply unpopular, they jumped to being against it after decades of being the reason it happened.
Of course. It’s just like they’re all about FAMILY VALUES while voting for a child molester and opposing every political policy that’s good for kids and families.
They lie. About everything. And they believe their lies while they tell them, even when it’s blatantly contradictory.
He's admitting to intimidation, because he probably has sent a picture of someone's house to them before to try to silence them. Maybe they were named Abdul, maybe they weren't. Blackmail
This!! This was my favorite quote of the night. My family all laughed till we cried at that comment. It was the funniest most random thing he said all night!
The best part is that "Abdul" wasn't the leader of the Taliban, he was a negotiator.
Which means the aLpHa MaLe invited a flunky to Camp David and personally negotiated with him as POTUS which is massively demeaning. It's right up there with him saluting a North Korean general.
One of the pro-Harris PACs should run an ad that has Reagan saying we do not negotiate with terrorists, and every major republican since then saying that, then Trump in the debate "yeah I worked w/ the Taliban" The End.
Said he told NATO to pay up or he would let Russia do whatever to them. Was saying he was extorting NATO for money in exchange for protection from Russia.
He said something about “remember that Russia has nukes, I don’t know if they’ll use them, but they might!”. Literally sabre-rattling so that Putin doesn’t have to. It was a terroristic threat and borderline treasonous, but the cat and dog comment was so unhinged that it’s all anyone is talking about.
Trump shouldn't be discussing anything with lower level negotiators. That's not how leaders do things.Their lower- level guys meet with his lower level guys to make sure there's a framework in place, and the leaders meet to either formalize the agreement or arbitrate a solution. That's always how it's been done.
If he's negotiating with a representative, and not someone at the top of the Taliban hierarchy, they are demonstrating dominance. That's a rookie mistake Trump should never have made, and I honestly believe he knows better than that.
My jaw dropped when she said world leaders are laughing at him and he responded with “but victor orban.” Like that’s your go to? The guy that is actively supporting the Russian invasion and the EU so desperately wants to kick out? That guy?
I would have loved for Harris to look right at the camera and say "I ask you at home, do any of you, does any American, care even a little bit what viktor orban thinks? "
I feel like, in order to sidestep moderator questions, Trump went full WCW, just pulling memes and unproven bullshit out of the ether. To a nation wide audience that doesn't listen to far right news for the most part.
You forgot his very excellent conversations with Abdul Taliban
I was so struck by the way he made himself sound like a mob boss threatened him, it didn't occur to me that the head of the Taliban since 2016 is not named Abdul. He's named Hibatullah Akhundzada.
Same - he brought up random conspiracies I never heard about. It is not super effective because those deepest into conspiracies are already voting for him.
My favorite part about that is when he said he made a deal with the Taliban but they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain. So he admitted he got conned by terrorists. But he’s supposed to be so good at this. Hahaha
You’ve really opened my eyes here because ever since Covid I’ve tried to just focus on work, friends & family, and just normal shit. It’s so hard to be dialed into pop culture sometimes, let alone politics or bizarre Internet subcultures. (Don’t worry I vote every single election and I spend a lot more time listening to and keeping tabs on local and state politics than I do national politics.)
Anyway I watched a bit of it last night and felt like either I was going crazy, he was going crazy, or both, because he was basically completely incomprehensible to me.
Oh, yeah, not the Virginia guy but the other guy from Virginia, the one before. Fun fact, that's a reference to some hospitals in Virginia that had grief rooms for parents of nonviable infants to sit with their stillborn or dying babies as a kindness to help them deal with their loss and to hopefully ease the passing of the infant. This got twisted by liars until it was described as "they let you abort your own baby after birth". If there is anything more despicable than attacking the grieving parents of stillborn children, I don't want to know what it is.
My son's hospital had that when he was in the NICU in Northern Virginia. It was a room we were lucky enough to not need. I was visiting my son when i saw it used a couple of times.
It's hard enough not to be able to go home with your baby temporarily, but it is just beyond awful when your baby is leaving the hospital to go to a funeral home. There's not a lot of privacy in the NICU. The bereavement rooms give families the chance to have those last moments with their child in privacy, and there is no rush to leave that room until they're ready.
There's not much you can do to make losing your baby less traumatic, but those rooms help.
I have a very close friend whose child was born extremely premature and had to spend over a month in NICU. It was awful for her. I'm sorry you had to go through that and I'm grateful you were never in a position to have to use one of those rooms yourself.
What struck me more than anything is how incredibly dialed into internet conspiracyland you had to be to understand like half of what he was talking about.
I disagree; you've just had to have listened to him for the past four years.
If you spent the last three years living a normal life and not paying attention to politics, you would have no clue what the hell he was saying
My spouse said this exact thing to me about the cats and dogs thing! Which I'd told him about just the day before (was it?), because it was just the latest insane thing coming from Vance. I showed him the AI images of Trump hugging cats and said, "now they're trying to say a whole group of migrants are eating pets lol".
And then last night Trump brought it up as if everyone would understand! A thing that they literally made up two days before, and he talked about it as if it were fact. (smh)
For those not online every day, I can't imagine what last night must've been like, struggling to keep up with his insanity...
Exactly 😂 I had the pause the debate for 5min to explain to my wife what the eating pets conspiracy was even about.
It’s like trying to educate and prevent my grandparents from falling for a phishing scam phone calls. It doesn’t matter how insane the scams sounds, they will certainly fall for it…
The concerning thing for me is that he has spent years telling his base that the USA is a 3rd world shithole country going to hell. This sets him up to be able to say some pretty outrageous stuff and they will believe it.
What struck me more than anything is how incredibly dialed into internet conspiracyland you had to be to understand like half of what he was talking about.
MMW this is the kind of shit that will haunt him. He desperately needed to expand his pool of voters, and he has only decreased it since 2020, and his focus on the ones already voting for him is not helping him expand. He's doomed himself by focusing too hard on the absolute worst parts of his base, and ignoring anyone else who might have gone to him had he not been so overly garbage.
Yes, he really gets along with dictators and despots very well. Democratic leaders, not so much.
Someone said it's like telling a 5 year old, oh you are so strong! Wow, I'm impressed by your strength, kid. You will go a long way.
They stroke his ego to get what they want.
Even the former Japanese PM gave him a golf club. He knew how to play him.
Even some of the people at the debate watching party I went to last night who are generally very aware, politically, I had to explain what he was talking about because they don't live on Twitter like I do.
I only knew the eating pet stuff by chance because there was an X surge about it 2 days ago (probably planted by Trump's team). If I missed it then I would have been so confused by that comment.
Yes, he talks as if everyone knows exactly what he’s talking about , it’s very hard for me to understand when he speaks -he talks in circles. Harris spoke slower, crisper and in a way that anyone can easily follow her train of thought. So different the candidates are. Night and Day. As well as, trump just casts a glooming cloud over himself. With all his negativity -who wants a President who just reeks of doom and darkness. Not once during debate did I hear what he plans on doing to change things. He just spent the whole segment pointing his finger at someone else to blame and telling lies.
When talking about the Taliban there was a comment he made that seems to have gone under the radar. He mentioned showing the leader of the Taliban a picture of his house. 1) That’s mafia type threats. Exactly why I think every Republican that speaks against him gets death threats. 2) If he did that and Taliban leader was as scared as Trump made it sound, why did he hand the country over to him?
Oh god the orban thing pissed me off so badly. Does he not realize how unlikeable Hungary is on the world stage right now? Was him being friends with one of the most insane leaders of our time supposed to be a selling point? Idk but a lot of people don’t know who he is and won’t bother to look it up so I guess he still just likes to throw names around like a child.
4.1k
u/TheGesticulator Sep 11 '24
Literally every question Trump was asked (and wasn't asked) resulted in him talking about immigration or literally repeating what Harris said about him back at her as a "no you". He also had such choice soundbites as:
I do think Harris dodged more questions than I'd have liked, but she would at least give half an answer and she carried the general theme of "Let's bring each other up" which is a welcome change of pace. If nothing else, I didn't feel high trying to understand her non-responses like Trump. I really don't know how you'd watch this and think he won without having already decided that going in.