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Trump Is the Unforced Error
From “Lock Her Up,” which the FBI had the wisdom and foresight not to do, to “Build That Wall,” which a federal judge had the wisdom and foresight to suspend, to “Russia, Find Us Those 35,000 Documents,” to the pee-pee dossier, to General Flynn being framed and hung out to dry, to treason with Russia, to Impeachment I, to the phone call extorting Ukraine, to (laughingly I say) withholding 0bama’s Javelins to Ukraine, to keeping his taxes private, to Charlottesville, to Clorox, to Biden’s 3 a.m. victory, to the Capitol protests, to Impeachment II, to the Mar-a-Lago stolen nuclear documents —
Trump is the unforced error. See the unforced error, live the unforced error, BE the unforced error!
Hillary/JEB! 2024.
***
It’s about 1:30 a.m. here (and I don’t have my first cup of coffee ’til 3 a.m.). And I woke up at midnight, and in my semi-lucidity, thought: What the heck is going on here (at Ricochet). We are all intelligent, conservative, informed people, and we’ve (some of us) gone from arguing that Trump’s tweet showed bad judgment, to that it was an unforced error, as if this in itself disqualifies him — and at least one member seems to really be arguing that Trump really intended to scrap the Constitution, which if true would very probably disqualify him. (I say “probably” because I’m not sure what would disqualify anyone from anything while some people are so upset that they really are talking about a soft or even a hard revolution.)
So, what the heck in today’s politics constitutes an “unforced error?” I won’t repeat all the so-called gaffes and mal mots that were always one step away from ending Trump’s career in 2016 and afterward, or that should have — by conventional wisdom — ended Biden’s 2020 candidacy in ignominious defeat. But what actually is an unforced error these days? And the way it was told in the Press, and is still evident today, that every single thing that Trump has done and is doing today is somehow (or is tainted with) a clumsy, unforced error.
And it seems to me that somehow, by definition, every sentiment that Trump tweets is an unforced error. It’s not that Trump creates unforced errors, but that somehow he is in himself an unforced error.
And then I thought about all the people who say that — ungraciously, I think — that Trump is a symptom, a symptom of Republican malfeasance and incompetence. Sure, there’s some metaphorical truth to that, but — as @drbastiat put so well in his recent post — badmouthing Republicans is a longstanding tradition of the Left, and yet we’ve gone beyond that to Trump and Trump supporters are a threat to truth, justice, and the American Way, and according to Biden and his DOJ and his FBI, they are domestic terrorists.
And yet, Trump is the problem. With his rough language, and abrasive style, and mean tweets, Trump’s unforced errors, or bad (political) judgment are the real problems that we conservatives and Republicans are having in electing effective leaders to congress and the White House.
But if Trump’s so bad, why did we elect him the first time, and why did we vote for him the second time?
If Trump’s so bad and politically clumsy, how did he ever become the standard bearer, the de facto figurehead, of the Republican Party?
Clearly, according to his detractors, Trump is the unforced error.
Published in General
Covfefe proves it!
I’m confused, but then it is 1030 and I am only half-way though my 1st cup of coffee.
I added my answer to the body of the post, Red.
I want a covfefe coffee cup.
I was thinking, Hey, I could register the domain covfefe.com! And I googled it and saw a 2017 article that 1100 covfefe-themed domains had been registered.
The walls are closing in…
And of course, the establishment Republicans are the brilliant ones.
Our very own “I’m a Reagan Republican TM” keeps telling us it’s true. Somehow these gas lighters are going to tell me that Katie Hobbs is a better candidate than Kari Lake? What universe do they live in? Not one closely connected with reality, obviously.
I’m a Reagan voter, too, but I don’t need to keep saying so to prove my bona fides.
The tense in that sentence is confusing.
I still bear the personal stigma of voting for Carter.
#Me Too
Screw that! I voted for Mondale, because Reagan was the establishment and he needed to know that he was a short leash. If not for my vote, he might have gone all “thousand points of light”on America.
He keeps using it as part of current election debate.
I was in the AF when Carter was president. I was in Germany when the GLCM debate was ongoing. Do I need to say how I voted?
Somebody here must have sent a mail-in ballot to Russia and voted for Putin…just to show all you other revolutionaries who the real man is. Too bad though, Russia doesn’t allow mail-in balloting. It can’t be trusted.
I will add slightly to this by adding that Trump is certainly not a symptom of Republican malfeasance and incompetence but a natural answer to and result of the establishment GOP’s constant marginalization of everyone else in the party to keeping their power safe and to keep making their deals with other elites.
Among the things which Trump is, he is an excuse those same elites and their willing useful (respectfully deleted) use to ignore the real issues which that natural answer and result to begin with.
Thank you Flicker. I’ve been struggling with this too, this idea of unforced error, giving ammo, lacking discipline. You nearly organized some thinking on this which illuminates for me why I’ve been reacting the way I’ve been reacting to those kinds of arguments. The reasons are many and complex, it turns out. However, it all boils down to just another weapon, a smear tactic. Regardless of the underlying truth or even the significance of the underlying truth, that can always be downplayed or ignored by focusing instead on the delivery of the message or on the messenger himself.
I know why the Dems do it. More complex is why “we” do it. Personally I file it under the umbrella of timid, incompetent, or fake, my catchall description of the Republican establishment. In some cases it’s just projection: the Trump personality cult isn’t in fact sycophant supporters but actually detractors who don’t know or don’t like that their primary driver is style not substance.
With no Carter, there probably would have been no Reagan. One learns from mistakes. I just don’t have the unadulterated adulation of Reagan as many do, however. He made his share of unforced errors. And as time distances us from the end of a bipolar Cold War to a unipolar world to a multipolar world, I’m not convinced its ending was an unadulterated good.
Thank you. And yes, it is a vaguely articulated problem, clearly stigmatizing on one side, intended to distract and slander, but on our conservative side, and related to a number of other posts up now (particularly @oldbathos’ The Right Not to Applaud), the figuring is on discretion and context and social power; and ranges from cowardice, avoidance, and fatigue, to rationalization and fitting in, and to reason, truth, and bravery.
“Unforced errors” really speaks to “but can he win” and to the election process as a whole, a process which is unknowable at present and assumed by some to be, on the whole, the election process of all decades past. In 2016, the whole question of “but can he win” never came up once the people, fed up as they were, nominated Trump for the Republican presidential slot. The truth is that, though hopeful, no one really thought he could win.
But by 2020, many thought that Trump would win, and were surprised at his losing, and frankly, couldn’t believe that he legitimately lost. And there’s been much written at the time about the 2016 election “irregularities” and since then about the “fortifications”.
I’ve never been impressed by published pre-election polling but rather amazed at their flightiness and wild inaccuracy — they seem to be measuring the direction of a flock of blind birds. And the 2016 polling showed just this. Polling seems, to me, to be both propaganda, and if anything is real about them, measuring the effectiveness of the propaganda of previous polls. Predicting the future by psychological evaluation of present beliefs seems fraught with error; much like evaluating people’s belief in, and fear of, Global Warming: there’s nothing scientific about it, but merely measuring current beliefs in light of what people have been told.
If this isn’t the realm of propaganda (not to mention government psyops) I don’t know what is. And while exit polling can be informative, it seems to me that, like finally breaking off a friendship, the reasons for doing so are due to a long history of behaviors and hopes and disgruntlement, and not the small, seemingly insignificant, recent events that are the straws that break the camel’s back, that more fall into the realm of the symbolic.
And it seems to me that emotions are more the venue for making big decisions like choosing a mate (with its intangible spark), or buying a house (curb appeal being reason number-1) or deciding to have another child. And so it seems with choosing a president, or for that matter a political party. Rationales seem to be largely rationalizations to cover what you really, on balance, just want apart from “reasons”.
In the end, I don’t think that “unforced errors” are really the reasons people choose anything, but rather are only rationales that justify the emotion-based decisions that one already has made.
The ultimate problem with polling is that there are three different populations – the first is easiest to poll – all of the registered voters. The second population is the likely voters – and likely is a judgment call on the part of the pollster. The third population is those who actually cast ballots or have ballots cast in their name.
Yes, this, and also that poll-writers can tend to decide the outcome from the biases of the questions, even inadvertently, as well as deliberately. And now — I forget the term for it — ah, yes, we have voters who engage in preference falsification, more and more deliberately in this age of cell phone and internet monitoring and of cancellation.
I once scandalized Peter Robinson by insisting that it is out patriotic duty to lie to the pollsters whenever being non-responsive was not an option. Growing up in DC I was and am very sensitive to how corrupt the polling industry is.
Maybe you could write a post on it, from your own viewpoint.