‘Maybe I’ve Gotten Worse’: Trump Makes Clear That Unity Is Over

Please start go back to saying the n-word out loud

My thoughts exactly: Yes, Trump do please double down on the dumb! Expose the racism and sexism in your heart! Show the world what you really stand for! Don't hold back, now: If you really think sharks are going to electrocute you and that the windmills are being constructed by liberals for the sole purpose of giving you cancer just let it all out. Use the world as your therapy couch 👍

It will force people like my neighbors--who already proudly display Trump signs in their yards--to reveal exactly the type of people that they are.

Never. Some people are wired differently...to be more fearful.

It's comforting to have someone who expresses their fear and says they'll do something different than the scary thing.

Of course they're afraid! If you watched/listened to right wing media every day you would be too. That's all they talk about: The other is out to get them. To make their lives harder. To turn their children gay/trans! To steal their jobs! To replace them, the true Americans!

If the world is too complicated for you to understand it sure feels great to hear someone simplify it for you like that. It's not your dumb ass that's causing any problems, it's the others! The ones that aren't like you! They don't even look like you! They come from different places! They have strange and scary traditions and rituals you don't understand! It must be a conspiracy! They're out to take everything away from you!

The world can't be that complicated, right? The Right believes that everything has a simple explanation. That's why they love talking points. Right wing media embraces this to the extreme. A scientist listening to Fox News explain something like CRISPR might just barf; it's that bad. Whereas non-mainstream right wing media wouldn't even try and would instead just make something up like saying, "they're using chemicals to turn the frogs gay."

What does it even mean?

Yes. Yes they are afraid of the world and everything/everyone in it.

They often have malformed amygdalas keeping them in a constant state of fear and paranoia

Yeah, because the media needs the barest amount of plausible deniability, obviously

Also, isn't 'victim' a word you use if you want people to feel sympathy for that person?

Accuse of cheating, accuse of cheating, ok might as well cheat ourselves then.

I'm using Bypass Paywalls Clean v3.6.3.0 to deal with that.

 

Article text:

Early in his speech in Minnesota on Saturday night, former President Donald J. Trump made clear just how quickly he has jettisoned the appeal for national unity that he made after he survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania two weeks ago.

“I want to be nice,” Mr. Trump said. “They all say, ‘I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him.’”

But to a cheering crowd of thousands, Mr. Trump quickly conceded the point. “No, I haven’t changed,” he said. “Maybe I’ve gotten worse. Because I get angry at the incompetence that I witness every single day.”

Propelled by the upheaval in the presidential race caused by President Biden’s decision to end his campaign six days ago, Mr. Trump on Saturday once more escalated his attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee.

During a speech lasting roughly 90 minutes, Mr. Trump called Ms. Harris “evil,” “unhinged” and “sick.” He lied about her views on abortion in an effort to paint her as extreme, and he mocked her laugh and her demeanor.

“We have a brand-new victim,” Mr. Trump told thousands of people inside the Herb Brooks National Hockey Center in St. Cloud, Minn. “And, honestly, she’s a radical left lunatic.”

Mr. Trump spent considerable time attacking Ms. Harris’s views on public safety, taking aim at her efforts to portray herself as a “rule of law” prosecutor who contrasts starkly with Mr. Trump’s two impeachments, four criminal indictments and 34 felony convictions.

As he rallied some 60 miles from Minneapolis, where the killing of George Floyd in 2020 prompted a movement for criminal justice reform, Mr. Trump accused Ms. Harris of backing soft-on-crime policies, including a push to defund the police.

Ms. Harris told The New York Times in 2020 that she supported the “defund the police” movement’s idea of rethinking “what public safety looks like” and the size of police budgets. “But, no, we’re not going to get rid of the police,” she said. “We all have to be practical.”

But Mr. Trump, who throughout his third campaign for president has cloaked himself in support for law enforcement even as he grapples with criminal cases, used Ms. Harris’s past support of criminal justice reform to insist that he was “going to over-fund” the police.

Mr. Trump’s focus on public safety and his accusations that Democrats have allowed crime to run rampant in cities have been at the heart of his three political campaigns. His return to that message in Minnesota demonstrated how central his plea to law and order will most likely be to his effort to win over moderate and independent voters.

Mr. Trump and his team are eager to flip Minnesota, which last voted for a Republican president in 1972, but which also has a large population of working-class voters and union workers, groups that Mr. Trump drew support from in his previous elections. He lost the state by just 1.5 percentage points in 2016, only to lose it by a wider margin four years later.

Even as the race has changed dramatically, in St. Cloud, Mr. Trump drew on the same themes that have been animating his campaign all year: protectionist trade policies, an enormous crackdown on immigration and his relentless repetition of his false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

“Anybody that can cheat on elections like they cheat on elections, these are not stupid people,” Mr. Trump said of Democrats, even though there is no evidence to support his claims.

Still, Mr. Trump’s speech highlighted his struggle to adapt to a new opponent after years of preparing to face Mr. Biden. Though Mr. Biden is no longer on the Democratic ticket, Mr. Trump revived his derisive impressions of the president, caricaturing his gait and speech to suggest that Mr. Biden is not fit for office.

At one point in his speech, Mr. Trump appeared about to imitate Mr. Biden but then stopped himself. “I don’t want to waste a lot of time on it,” he said, “because it’s over now, right? He’s gone.” But he gloated: “I told you that he would be. I told you that he wasn’t going to make it.”

Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for the Harris campaign, criticized Mr. Trump’s focus on Mr. Biden. “Tonight in Minnesota, a bitter, unhinged, 78-year-old convicted felon kept clinging to his lies about the 2020 election he lost being ‘rigged,’ rambled about his former opponent and golfing, and made excuses for why he’s afraid to debate Vice President Harris,” she said in a statement.

Saturday’s rally was Mr. Trump’s second joint rally with Senator JD Vance of Ohio since he chose Mr. Vance to be his running mate. Mr. Vance largely echoed Mr. Trump’s attacks, calling Ms. Harris overly liberal and a “card-carrying member of the San Francisco lunatic fringe.”

And Mr. Vance, whose rollout as the Republican vice-presidential nominee has not been wholly smooth, attacked the press for not being sufficiently critical of Ms. Harris.

“The media told us that Joe Biden was Abraham Lincoln,” Mr. Vance said. “And now the media tells us that Kamala Harris is Martin Luther King Jr.”