I don’t know what was wrong with Joe Biden. It’s hard to imagine that they ever would have asked for a debate if this was the way he is normally. We’ve seen him recently holding press conferences and giving speeches and he seemed to be fine. They said he had a cold so maybe he really was on drugs — Nyquil or Mucinex or something that made him seem so shaky and frail. Whatever it was, it was a terrible debate for him and if he does stay in the race (which is almost certain in my opinion) the campaign is going to have a lot of work to do to dig out of the hole that was dug last night. The media smells blood and they are circling like a bunch of starved piranhas.
. . . For some odd reason, moderator Jake Tapper told Trump in the beginning that he didn’t need to answer the questions and that he could use the time however he wanted. Trump ran with that, essentially giving a rally speech whenever he had the floor and was unresponsive to the vast majority of the questions. He made faces and insulted Biden to his face, at one point calling him a criminal and a Manchurian candidate. If anyone had said 10 years ago that this would happen at a presidential debate they would have been laughed out of the room.
After the debate when most of the country had turned off cable news or gone to bed, CNN aired its fact check. And it’s a doozy:
It sure would have been good if even some of that epic litany of lies could have been checked while people were still watching. The decision to have the moderators sit like a couple of potted plants woodenly asking questions about child care while Trump responded with irrelevant lies was inexplicable. Why did they even bother to ask questions at all? They could have just run the timer and let the candidates talk for two minutes each about anything they wanted. It probably would have been more enlightening.
Someone educated can correct me but that doesn’t sound accurate. Even if it Trump were to go full hitler (which is dumb for an aspiring autocrat in this day and age) it wouldn’t work like that. They’d denigrate all non whites but have a specific target group that they persecute/kill. The group needs to be specific for fascism so they can have a sacrificial goat to blame everything on.
The real answer is he will continue the gutting of the administrative state. The direction we are going is corporatism. Absolution of federal agencies tasked with legally protecting people (education, health, environmental protection, labor protection, safety, finance regulation) and expanding the agencies that legally bind people (police, prisons).
It’s not likely that Trump would be going “full Hitler”. But the governors of Texas and Florida might.
Oh yeah for sure, that sounds way more likely my reply is more in following with the other posters “Trump will go full Nazi” hypothesis. Just seems like fascism has a specific way of working that’s more complex than “kill every out group”.
Gutting the state as beefalo said is right but they’ll still have the usual scapegoats (immigrants, dog whistle racism, lgbtq community).
Any of these communities could be hit with state violence, either directly through police action or state sanctioned terrorism such as the proud boys, or indirectly by eroding protections and further marginalization.
Just look at what Texas and Florida are doing to hurt trans people and immigrants. Scale that up to a national level. That sort of stuff is in the project 2025 playbook. For example just being trans they want to make illegal under the pornography act. And charge teachers who talk about the existence of trans people with child sexual assault.
So, hopefully not gas chambers and witch hunts but, it could get pretty bad for a lot of people.