Donald Trump was scheduled to appear with former Fox News personality Dan Bongino for an interview on Friday, but a few minutes into their discussion, the ex-president abruptly ended the questioning. Bongino, who has been supportive of Trump in the past, appeared to be confused."Can I get, Dan, off ...
He’s suffering from frontotemporal dementia. This is relatively certain. The town hall was classic sundown syndrome. The fundamentalists know this and are going to have him removed from office shortly after the election (if he wins). The democrats would gladly take the opportunity to remove him, as would many republicans. Unfortunately that would put Vance in the oval office which should terrify anyone who doesn’t want to larp a handmaid’s tale.
As a European I find it utterly bewildering that people seriously consider voting for him. But alas I don’t get a say in it.
Dude there’s a whole cottage industry here that’s dedicated to trying to understand why people vote for him, and the answers are as varied as they are stupid.
But how else will podcasters, ring light, and audio equipment manufacturers make a living? Who will hear about FACTOR meals and $40 underwear with neon laser rainbow cats?
I forgot about neon cat, thanks for the nostalgia hit.
Wait, do you mean Nyan cat?
Yeah, I havent thought about it in years so I guess my brain decided it was neon instead of nyan since the words are pronounced more or less the same.
That shit was harrowing at the retirement home I worked at. I only worked during the day, so the worst thing I saw was falls. My fiancé’s brother worked at night, though. The residents would get stir crazy at night. They’d try to “escape,” and they’d be found laying in the nearby hospital’s flower bead. This was in NON-assisted living. Trump definitely reminds me of those residents. They’d end up walking to the hospital because it was the only place they knew how to get to, but they didn’t know why they were walking there. They just wanted to escape. A lot of them expected their old house/ kid’s house.
There are fake Bus Stations in front of some Nursery Homes with patients for dementia, because when they escape… they wait for the Bus.
That’s a good one!
My grandma did that. She escaped a dozen times, even behind a passcode door.
If you watched exclusively right-wing media, you would get heavily edited (and mercifully brief) presentations of Trump, along with hours of talking heads playing him up while demonizing Harris (and of course heavily edited presentations of the Democrat). The issue is not with their choice of Trump but with their choices of what media to consume - the latter choices lead quite logically and inevitably to the former choice.
The best explanation I’ve come up with after discussing politics at length with them is that they are gaslit. Pure and simple. They just have enough gullibility to see one tiny thing that coincides with something they were taught or otherwise believe. It also explains why they are being scammed so easily on truthsocial.
Trump just has that dirty salesman skill of creating a story with just enough validity or truth and twisting everything to his favor.
There’s a lot more that we can add to that. Washington politics are so amazingly dirty, they have been for decades, everyone knows it, and Trump is different from other people. He’s actually even dirtier than most career politicians, but he feels different from them.
You also have the problem that some government institutions are corrupt and big business is very corrupt. It’s easier for people to imagine that conspiracy theories are true when they can openly see badness happening around them left unchecked. For example, if I watch on TV or YouTube and I see a court case where the prosecutor, lead detectives, and the judge are all incredibly biased and some of them are bad liars, then I know something is wrong with that courthouse. I might extrapolate and conclude that something is wrong with all courthouses. Which is to say, I’ve become more vulnerable to conspiracy theories because real bad behavior is left unchecked.
It’s also important not to forget the interpersonal aspect of how their lot get news. A lot of them believe their family and friends’ words more than a published news source. I see an echo to how urban myths got spread in pre-internet days: a neighbor’s cousin’s best friend’s coworker swears the story really happened to them! It must be true!
When a story is emotionally-engaging enough, it will get spread without ever being questioned. Trump’s path to power basically hijacked (and reinforced) that pre-existing tendency.
Damn, the behavioral variant describes him well. Impulsive, uninhibited, socially unacceptable, listless, and apathetic.
Careful with yer language there, pardner, lest you force us to export some freedom to your country. We’ve been spoilin’ for a real fight for some time now. Our poors would love nothing better than a meaningful mission, food, housing, and healthcare, and we’ve got all this incredible murder tech that we don’t get to use, all provided by Uncle Sam.
JD Vance is a flawless beauty with wonderful concepts of ideas, and I won’t hear anything different, got it, Sharon?