Donald Trump’s debate performance was far worse than even his inner circle anticipated.
While Donald Trump’s team is publicly pushing a postdebate victory lap, many in his camp were privately disappointed in the Republican candidate’s performance on Tuesday.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported Wednesday night that several Trump insiders were “stunned” by his poor performance and by just how easily he fell for all of Kamala Harris’s attempts to provoke him.
“I’m told that as soon as Donald Trump exited that debate stage, he immediately began quizzing those waiting in his viewing room about how the last 90 minutes had gone,” said Collins. “While several people praised him to his face, telling him they did a great job, that’s not what a lot of them are saying privately today.
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Apparently, all that practice with members of his team, such as former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, had ultimately amounted to very little when it came time to debate.
Considering his rapidly deteriorating mental faculties and the fact that’s he’s surrounded himself with yesmen; he probably really believes that he did well in that debate.
A person like this does not have inner reflection the way you’re imagining. I vouchsafe this fact to you: he sought external validation immediately, real and imagined, and then moved on to the next pissing contest without ever thinking genuinely about his choices leading up to that display
Spot on. I’ve read 10,000 comments regarding Trump that miss the most basic aspect of the man: Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Everything he says or does flows from this.
I don’t mean narcissist in the way most people sling the word around, I mean the actual mental illness. People slap that title on anyone selfish, lying or bullying. No, words have meaning.
No he doesn’t have any sort of internal reflection. My mother suffered NPD, I can tell you all about it. She didn’t have the mental space to consider, “Am I wrong?”. Such thoughts were literally impossible, her brain could not work that way. In the 50-years I knew that woman I never heard her admit fault or apologize. Not once. That’s pretty stunning if you think on it a few. And Trump makes mom look positively of sound mind!
Nothing the man says or does surprises me, yet people continue to be appalled. We keep trying view his thought processes through the lens of our own. Nah. That dog don’t hunt.
Nmom kid here too, you’re spot on. It’s actually fascinating if you forget the horrors. Like for example no empathy, and not like very very very low (hi dad!) empathy, but totally devoid of it. Just ‘cannot compute’ level.
Hope you’re doing fine btw!
I agree. Nmom kid here. I thought she didn’t have a concept of “truth”. To her, every statement was equally valid as long as it was useful to her. Just complete and total lack of a consistent worldview.
Whatever self-help-scam guru or conservative politician told you that your mum has NPD, they were probably lying. And if by some miracle you were actually told this by a doctor (unlike 9/10 people who make these claims), then blaming her abusive behaviour on neurodivergence is not scientifically sound. People with mental disorders are possessed of free will. They are not monsters, or trolls, or goblins, or vampires. They don’t follow mystical rules of behaviour. They are sapient human beings possessed with the gifts of consciousness and free will. They are capable of choices.
Your mum chose to be abusive. The illness didn’t choose for her. If you want to believe a mental disorder was responsible, and not a human being, then you’re diminishing her choice to abuse you. You’re saying it wasn’t her who did it, it wasn’t her who is responsible. That’s a form of Stockholm syndrome. You’re refusing to believe the fact that a person, a human being, can have been so awful as to have chosen to do those things. You need to deny the concept of free will in order to rationalise your abuse as a form of natural, inevitable disaster. If it was a cosmic accident, an illness, a psychological inevitability, then it wasn’t cruelty, not really. That’s what you’re grasping at straws to believe, because it isn’t quite as bad as the truth. But the truth is it was cruel. A person abused you, not a mental illness. She could have chosen to be a good parent to you, even though she’s neurodivergent, and she didn’t. And that sucks, and I’m sorry that you had to experience that.
I’m not entirely sure he doesn’t stew on this.
Hitler, famously, obsessed over negative news coverage/press about him. Even to the point where he threatened violence/war with New York if they didn’t redact a column about him being a wannabe dictator.
Trump is the same kind of narcissist Hitler was, and gets similarly obsessed with negative press about him.
I agree that I doubt he’s reflecting on this, but he’s absolutely aware the rest of the world thinks he screwed up and that’s why he thinks they’re lying. Because everyone else around him says he won, so how could, literally every news agency, including Fox Entertainment “news”, say Kamala beat him?
But he is absolutely pissed and stewing in his own piss right now at all the negative coverage after his debate performance.
There is one exception to the “Trump hates negative press” that I’d like to note. When Dr. Fauci was called to meet with Trump after he corrected him on live TV about drinking bleach, he found Trump in his office saying “My god these ratings are amazing, they’re better than cable”. Oddly enough sometimes Trump sees any news is good news so long as he’s the main focus.
The times I’ve seen him really go off is when the news cycle stops paying attention to him.
Yep.
Isn’t it crazy how common it now is to understand and converse with people about the specifics of an otherwise rare personality disorder?
vouchsafe
TIL
Oh yeah. That was a very nice choice of words.
A cromulent lexical affixation.
I’m sure he doesn’t even care that people are mocking him about it, the fact that everybody is talking about “concepts of a plan” and “they’re eating the cats” is still a victory in his mind. Good attention or bad attention doesn’t matter, attention for the sake of attention is the only thing he cares about. Nobody is really talking about anything specific Harris said or did, she didn’t really have any really breakout moments that I can recall after having watched it, it was just Trump being a jackass and saying dumb shit.
“Several of them told CNN they were stunned that the former president failed to do a better job executing on the talking points that he had been preparing with his team for weeks against Vice President Harris, her record, her policy reversals.”
Apparently, all that practice with members of his team, such as former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, had ultimately amounted to very little when it came time to debate.
Oh please. If there is a trump “insider” who thinks for one hot second this demented chattering rapist can stay on message without large-type notes and a shock collar, then they’re as big an idiot as they sound.
"
We have always been at war with Eureast AsiaTrump will absolutely dominate the debate. "It doesn’t matter what they believe, as long as the repeat what the party wants them to say.
It’s amazing to me that anybody on his team was shocked he did so poorly. It just indicates to me that they’re absolutely shit at their jobs. Being a good advisor requires you to be able to recognize the difference between reality and fantasy, and anybody who thought Trump would do well in this debate after spending any amount of time actually listening to him has failed this most basic of tests.
I’m surprised that he did so well in the debate, actually. I mean, he still got absolutely bodied, but no microphones picked up the sound of him shitting himself this time, so he’s already showing an improvement over his debate performance with Biden.
Edit: it just occurred to me that Trump randomly shitting himself could be the reason his team were so gung ho for muted mics: it means that there’s 50% less chance he’ll drop a deuce while near a hot mic. If so, that’s a great strategy on their part.
He did fine. He likely lost precisely zero votes. There was nothing for him to lose. It’s not like cult members watch their cult leader in a debate and then go “oh I guess I’ll leave my cult.” People leaving cults often literally have to go through a process of deprogramming and copious therapy.
Harris did well, so maybe she picks up a point, but since she’s lost about a point since the DNC, that makes it essentially a wash. While it was a good debate for Harris, it ends up meaning very little. All the hyperventilating about it is way outsized to the effect.
He did very poorly. His base is largely racist whites. Harris knows that very well and made sure to embarrass him in ways the base wouldn’t like. Belittled him to his face as if he was nothing, and smirked at his impotent old man rage. She made trump look old and bumbling, and even conservative media is having trouble denying it.
He looked weak and it will cost him votes. Especially since his campaign is barely trying dogshit at the moment.
Good luck and god speed.
It’s really not about him losing votes, though. Despite the fact that there are a truly mind-boggling number of idiot cultists out there who are for some reason devoted to this moron, there are not enough of them to win an election. Both candidates need to appeal to the vast pool of undecided or apathetic voters in order to win. In 2020, the Democrats won because that pool of people were highly motivated to oust Trump after living through 4 years of his presidency, but people have very short memories and even shorter attention spans, and so the Dems can’t really count on the same thing happening again in 2024.
When Trump was running against Biden at the beginning of this race, things were looking grim for the Democrats, because that group of morons who can’t be bothered to pay the slightest bit of attention to what’s happening in their government (apathetic & undecided voters) decided that they couldn’t really tell the difference between two senile, doddering old men, so Trump’s rambling incoherence wasn’t that big of a problem. Now that he’s facing someone more than 2 decades younger than him who still has the complete use of her mental faculties, it’s imperative for him to do SOMETHING to make himself not look like a shoeless old man in a hospital gown wandering between lanes of traffic after escaping from his rest home. This debate didn’t do that.
While that all may be true, if you look at projections for the electoral college based on polling numbers in battleground states, Trump is currently projected to win the presidency. So he actually doesn’t need to do much to make himself look any different, as frustrating and scary as that may be.
Current projections have Harris winning the popular vote and losing the election. So if she doesn’t increase her vote share, she’s going to lose due to the vagaries of the electoral college. She basically need to win by something absurd like 3.4% and have that adequately reflected in about five states.
Is it immoral to start a cult and continue to use cult tactics to steal members from another cult to deprogram them and herd them all into therapy? Asking for a friend, and 90% of our parents.
We need a cult of mental health.
-Are y’all with the cult?
-It’s not a cult, it’s an organisation that promotes the deprograming of-
-This is it.
A cult is a small religion. You keep saying cult, which means you keep saying small religion. Why do you keep specifying that the religion is small? It’s the same for big religions too.
You can expect a loss and still be surprised by the extent l.
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I agree partially, but he also did reasonably well perception wise against Hillary Clinton. I understand that she was kind of wooden, and that she is very much not a gifted orator, and that she had 30 years of media hatred beamed directly at her, but there were a lot of people saying the debates were going to be a blowout against Trump and they never were.
Harris worked her strategy in the debate nearly perfectly. She told the audience what they were going to see before they saw it (a hostile, out of touch, out of control liar), and later referred back to what she said when he became exactly that.
Hillary had canned lines like “A person who can be baited with a tweet should not have control of the nuke codes”, but she was telling instead of showing.
Kamala told the audience exactly what to expect, laid the bait out for him and completely knocked him off message, and then when the buffoonery arrived she pointed out that there he was, exactly as characterized. She showed everyone how easy it was to rile him up instead of just telling them, and by the ending portion where she was saying things similar to “Putin would eat you for lunch” and “strongmen want you to win because you’re weak and easily manipulated” it was clear that she was correct even to audience members who had no additional context about Trump.
Kamala told the audience what to expect and then demonstrated to them that what she was saying was accurate.
It wasn’t just anyone that could’ve executed this strategy so brilliantly against Trump. Many others have tried, and although I think most people suspected it would be possible to bring Trump the miserable, angry racist couch potato up onto the stage during a debate, we got only a tiny glimpse of it during a debate once before (when Trump had active COVID).
Despite it looking easy to manipulate him on a stage, in actuality I think it is pretty difficult to not get sucked into the non-sense vortex when someone’s feet away from you spewing out vile bullshit, and Harris was the first one to be able to not only trigger a storm exactly on cue, but also stand back calmly, get out of the way of the swirling debris, and stay focused on what she wanted to communicate with the audience.
When he debated Hillary, he was also 8 years younger than now and still had more reasonable people around him. Now he is surrounded by lunatics in an echo chamber. For a person that can‘t keep a thought for more than half a sentence, this is really bad.
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They were no expecting much, and he managed to even wreck those low expectations.
…because it surprised NO ONE else…
No one is surprised he did poorly, but I don’t think anyone expected him to do “immigrants are eating your pets” levels of bad.
They’re eating your cats! They’re eating your dogs!
They’re
eating your babiaborting your babies!Me, making sure I’m not watching The Onion News
I read that as absorbing your babies.
Yeah that’s probably true but I was not so secretly hoping he would.
What’s surprising is all the people who on Facebook are now saying it’s true lol
It’s literally the most absurd claim ever lol.
It’s possible it happened once probably by some druggie
But it’s definitely not something that happens regularly 😂
It’s crazy how these people literally see immigrants as animals or a different species lol
They’re just normal people
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The “immigrants are eating your pets” works on his followers unfortunately.
Anything would work on those followers. They are not the people anyone is trying to convince with the debate.
Trump is drowning in the misinformation you helped create yet now you wonder why he did badly?
Then they aren’t very good at their jobs.
A dead horse will never win the race, even if you drag it around really fast.
A not totally incompetent trainer of a dead horse would not be stunned how bad the dead horse does.
From the text, I conclude that the team trained El Douché apparently successfully, but the moment he approached the stage something popped in his head, the whole house of cards tumbled down.
When up against someone who can at least stay on topic, he looks like a mad man.
Apparently, all that practice with members of his team, such as former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, had ultimately amounted to very little when it came time to debate.
Well, in his defense, you try to teach this idiot anything. It’s impossible. /s
TBF he did terribly on the first debate as well, however he was able to form up his “terrible” strongly in mostly coherent lies that left Biden’s mumbled and lost “decent” truths in the dust.
This time Harris led strongly and let trump hang himself, which he did admirably at.
That’s just testimony that his cadre of sycophantic deer ticks are just as stupid as he is deranged.
This kind of article is such a joke. This is the same as them saying they are told people are eating dogs.
Maybe they need more mouth breathing. I would have sworn they had it covered but…
