So the Trumpistas in Reddit’s The_Donald are trying to figure out just why God Emperor Trump is plunging in the polls even though he continues to draw big crowds of scary and confused white people wherever he goes.
Apparently unable to conceive that Trump’s brand of belligerent narcisissism might be starting to wear thin for many people, many in the subreddit have concluded, as one much-upvoted comment alleges, that evil cuck pollsters “are over representing democrats to discourage Trump supporters.”
One commenter suggests that this eeevil alleged strategy may backfire, thus transforming Trump’s plunging poll numbers into something that’s … GOOD FOR TRUMP.
![o2toauUT 6 points 8 hours ago It will backfire on them unless they're planning on election fraud. If people think Hillary is a shoein they won't even bother to vote because most people who vote for her don't like Hillary, they just don't want Trump. If the news shows her up by 10 they will stay home. permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]LhtfootUSA 4 points 2 hours ago Wait... So, this could be an example of Trump playing 84 dimensional interstellar Slovakian guerrilla warfare tactics?](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/trumpinterstellar.png?resize=498%2C387&ssl=1)
Yes, that’s right: Trump could be losing in the polls ON PURPOSE. Because he’s THAT SMART.
Thank goodness for summer, more GOP voters can go outside and mentally affirm in their heads that no, the world isn’t ending and all is not as bad as they thought. By that I mean going out and seeing that society is not crumbling into utter horrors, or at least how they see horrors.
I also like to take note at how baggy Trump’s eyes have become. He looks like he hasn’t had much sleep. Plus with him getting overly irate to the point of kicking a baby out of his rally and his overreaction to a mosquito near him, is telling me he’s starting to break down.
@Sporkey
My understanding is that state deadlines are for parties, not individual candidates…there are ways for a party to replace a candidate that, say, dies or voluntarily withdraws from the race. The problem for the Republicans would be to get Trump to quit voluntarily (unlikely) and to start a brand-new campaign this late in the game (hard). Plus, there’s the practical issue of getting the candidates’ names on the actual ballots…withdrawing too close to the race would risk ballot problems.
@film runner
But wat abowt fwee speech?!!
They will be fuming.
Apparently, free speech is for anyone except feminists, blacks, Jews, commies or anyone deemed a ‘SJW’.
Free speech is making threats of violent rapes, murder or otherwise being a turd weasel on Twitter.
Sticking up for yourself, or for the rights of the oppressed is hate speech to be quashed and ridiculed.
What an arse about face world we’re living in?
@Ohlmann: Hillary Clinton really isn’t Centrist though. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/3/31/1374629/-Hillary-Clinton-Was-the-11th-Most-Liberal-Member-of-the-Senate
She’s more liberal than your median democrat in the Senate (Biden) and is significantly more liberal than Obama. As in, Obama is more of a centrist than Hillary Clinton is. The Democratic party really has moved to the left with her as a candidate.
I’ll stop worrying about Trump becoming president only after he loses. I was certain that he’d go down in flames after his notorious remark implying that John McCain wasn’t a war hero. When that didn’t happen, I knew that all bets were off.
His supporters are very concerning.
My takeaway: The USA needs a much, much better educational system. And of course more, better jobs.
I can’t help but notice that a lot of the progressive guys who attack Hilary on that stuff are also guys who made it big in the feminist circles (Anita’s co producer Johnathon McIntosh is pretty bad about this). I think maybe the reason these feminist guys attack her so hard and forgive Bernie for his same actions is sort of for the same reason that MRAtheists think they are not sexist. Namely much as the ARAtheists think their rationality makes them immune from irrational thought, so do a lot of feminist progressive guys think their feminism keeps them from being sexist, causing them to think their attacks on Hilary are fair.
Just my theory.
Also, I am a long time viewer first time poster.
Thus Spake Zaraleftwingfox:
Of course they will. Right-wing media has a vested interest in fluffing the Republican candidate’s chances, and mainstream media has a vested interest in portraying the horse race as neck-and-neck (regardless of the actual facts). Rather than admit one was bamboozled by wishful thinking and irresponsible reporting (and recognizing one’s hateful, counterproductive views are not shared by most voters) it’s far easier to save face by insisting the election was somehow illegitimate. And, of course, it provides convenient cover for the Republican Party to dig in for another 4-8 years of obstructionism.
@lord pabu
Are you joking? Hillary is as right wing as the Red Torys in the UK Labour Party. She is not a Socialist. She is not a Centrist either. She is a fiscal conservative with a few liberal policies. She is no more Left Wing than Obama. Bernie was the only candidate who was a Centrist, he liked to use the term Socialist, but in your country there is no such thing. McCarthy put paid to that. You have, as Gore Vidal often stated, a one party state masquerading as a two party state. Both your parties are there to serve the corporations, and are capitalistic and conservative. I’m sorry you’ve been led to believe otherwise. Socialism is not built on a few liberal policies here and there. It means a new approach to the economy, universal healthcare and rights for the working class, the disabled and dispossessed. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. The only president who even came close to socialism was FDR. Don’t confuse liberalism for being a ‘leftie’, this is a error I see all the time from American commentators.
We’re not out of the woods yet. Assange has promised to release more damaging information about HC later in the campaign.
Even if Trump loses, he’s already damaged political discourse tremendously, and I could see riots if he insists that he was cheated out of the election and pushes the point.
Also, there’s nothing to prevent him or someone like him from running again in 4 years, or from his coalition to start nominating candidates for lower offices. He’s proven that there’s a substantial voting bloc that is motivated by overt racism and nationalism. Put in the hands of a more skilled candidate, it might become a major political force in the US.
Trump has fucked the nation, and he’s going to keep fucking it in one way or the other for some time.
@Kat
Right there with you. Trump isn’t a gracious loser–or gracious, period–and I don’t trust him to admit defeat. I do trust him to rabble-rouse because that seems to be a go-to reaction for him.
@Lord Pabu : while I don’t really disagree (I did say “maybe” because that wasn’t something I was sure of given all the right-wing shit Obama have done), I would like to say three things :
* this method is hardly a faultless ordering of left-wing meaning. I can totally agree that it say something between, say, Biden and her, but when the gap is smaller like for Obama, the statistical result have to be taken with a hint of salt.
* her program, especially at first and before Sanders forced her to work on voters to her left, don’t look super left-wing to me.
* left-wing on that study hide differences. You can’t use only one axe when there is at least two big axis : fight against misogyny and racism ; and fight against poverty and economic misery.
Which by the way is very apparent when you see the fact that Sanders, despite being significantly leftier than Hillary, have a much better standing among a lot of Trump voters, simply because he is closer to them in a specific domain they care about.
@ Scildfreja, SFHC
Myeah, I, too, don’t particularly like that you always hear from the same families, such as the Clintons, the Bushes, the Skywalkers (ohhh, Rey better not be Luke’s daughter or there’ll be… *ahem* getting slightly off track), but I’m sure she’ll be a great president and infinitely better than orange Mussolini. I wasn’t too excited about her at first, but I’m won over now. So that’s cool. (Not that it matters, I’m not an American, but on a global scale, I guess it’s cool?)
Re: “voter fraud”
Ahh, the classic tactic of deflection. This is how shitbags claim victory. “No, we’re not the problem, you’re the problem.” (See also: “No, we didn’t lose, we got people to talk about these really important white cishet male issues that we constantly whine about like fucking babies.”)
@ Kat Yeah, and it worries me that there are fans of Mr. Drumpf and his tactics here in Canada. 😛
@Pocketnerd: (Not sure where the Thus spake Zara came from)
Fortunately the Trump campaign is so flighty and disorganized that they’ll probably be easily distracted from maintaining any narrative for long, which might be just enough to prevent a critical mass of armed insurrectionists.
feartheminotaur:
I think there’ll be a lot of militia cosplay in November and December: camo-clad dudes strutting around with long guns. There’ll be a “Million Patriot March” on DC, which will number maybe a thousand. There may be a re-run of Malheur featuring some federal property. Maybe some bomb threats, not all of them hoaxes. But, while I’ll be surprised if violence can be entirely avoided, I suspect that it’ll fall far short of the dire warnings we’ll increasingly hear from Trump supporters. Clinton will be sworn in without martial law being declared.
In future, though? That’s more worrying. A Trump loss will radicalise a lot of people. I wouldn’t be surprised to see major domestic terrorism next year. Let’s hope the FBI can nip that in the bud.
Thus Spake ZaraYoullNeverGuess:
That’s why I never stop evangelizing for Clinton to my Bernie-or-Bust friends. It isn’t enough that Trump lose; he needs to lose hard. If Trump loses in a squeaker, you can bet your last money that in four years the GOP will be running a candidate designed to energize the same “angry, nakedly racist asshole” demographic that Trump has cultivated, but without alienating the majority of Republicans who still need the GOP’s xenophobia to be cloaked in dogwhistles and plausible deniability.
@ leftwingfox
It’s a reference to “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Nietzsche. I assume it’s a work that Pocketnerd is quite fond of.
Thus Spake Zaraleftwingfox:
Just a thing I do. I’m delightfully whimsical! But I’ll knock it off if it bothers you.
(Also, hi! Don’t know if you recognize my handle, but we follow each other on Twitter and we’ve gamed together!)
Thus SpakeZaraViolinlessHoax:
“Fond of” is an overstatement. 🙂 Nietzsche is probably worth reading just for historical perspective, but… meh. He’s not exactly my favorite philosopher.
I think I actually picked up the habit from discussions of the tabletop RPG Exalted, where quotes from the writers were often prefaced that way, e.g. a quote from Rebecca Borgstrom would be introduced with “Thus Spake ZaraBorgstrom” to indicate this was one of the game’s designers speaking, rather than just fan theory.
And hey, speak of the Devil: Trump is already making excuses that if he loses, it’s because the election was, like, totally rigged, guys:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2016/08/03/3804668/no-donald-trump-voter-fraud-will-not-cost-you-the-election/
@Mary
You. Must. Stop.
When we’re discussing Murican politics, your diatribes into how all of us Muricans are wrong about everything aren’t welcome. Not to me anyway. You don’t get to decide what ‘liberal’, or ‘the left’ mean, especially in a context you don’t (or refuse to) understand. If all these Murican commentators (who live and operate here), including some of the commentating of this ‘lefty’ website, refer to Clinton as a ‘centrist’ or ‘center left’, perhaps the “error” is yours
And people wonder why I use the ‘quotes’ around those words…
@axe
No.
You think I do not understand?
America does not have a left wing.
Gore Vidal even knew that. Did he know nowt about American politics as well?
Politics are politics, it’s the USA who chose to deviate from the established terms.
Liberal does not a “leftist” make.
Go do some research.
This is exactly the reason why Trump is plunging in the polls. The scary and confused white people he’s attracting in rallies where they spew racial slurs, sexism, xenophobia, etc., is enough to keep the rest of us at bay.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/us/politics/donald-trump-supporters.html
http://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-there-is-only-one-party-in-the-united-states-the-property-party-and-it-has-two-right-gore-vidal-48-85-02.jpg
FYI
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20160804/8ace25a4-1794-40d3-93d2-840fcd4ca37e
Kiefer Sutherland as an accidental president in his new show
Okay, we can all relax now. Kiefer Sutherland to the rescue! (No, I don’t care that he’s a Canadian.)
@Virgin Mary
Okay, analogy time.
I was born and raised in the Australian tropics, which means I’m used to temperatures above 30 C/86 F. However, it’s currently 6 am in the middle of winter, so it’s only 9 C/48 F. This is NIPPLE-SHATTERINGLY FRIGID by my standards, but it’s average or even warm by other countries’, so by your logic, I shouldn’t be allowed to
piss and moan about my boobs and toes hurtingsay it’s currently cold.