What’s even sadder is that he would 100% be president right now if he didn’t constantly stick his foot in his own mouth.
Everything about Trump makes him one of the most awful human beings alive, and yet he would be the leader of the free world if he wasn’t also incredibly thin-skinned & stupid.
The problem is that no one fact checks him in his personal life, so he thinks it’s just a thing his political opponents do. But the reality is that no one thinks it’s worth the time to correct his wrong way of thinking, esp. when he can be a useful idiot and use his wrong ideas to distract from the issues at hand
They barely even fact checked him in the first place. They called him on a total of, what, three things? As opposed to the probably dozens of other complete untruths he uttered, not even just about policy and so forth but actual empirically verifiable elements of reality?
Here's just what I spotted:
Lied about not being involved with Project 2025 and not knowing what it is. We know he is acutely aware of what it is, and in fact some members of his staff were involved in its framing.
Lied about the number of immigrants coming into the country.
Further lied stating that other countries were "sending all their criminals and mental patients."
Claimed people were "aborting" babies after birth (called out by moderators).
Claimed Harris said she would ban fracking in Pennsylvania (called out by Harris).
Lied about crime rates going "through the roof" (called out by moderators).
Responded to this by claiming FBI crime stats were falsified by "leaving out problem cities."
Lied about migrants eating people's pets (called out by moderators).
Lied about inflation numbers post-pandemic.
Lied claiming that "Biden" built the Nordstream pipeline.
Distorted the truth by claiming he won more votes than any sitting president in the last election, failing to mention that Biden still got more.
There were probably others.
He also essentially admitted that his plan for the war in Ukraine was to just let Russia win. That should be pretty damn worrisome for anyone.
Lied about Kamala being a Border Czar. She led a diplomatic initiative aimed at curbing immigration, she was never directly involved in border matters.
Lied about how much aid the US is giving Ukraine and how others are not. Lied about how the aid is given (it's in US made products not in Cash, the money stays in the US).
I wish they had pushed him harder on the simple yes or no questions.
Also, Harris missed a perfect opportunity to point out that Trump has been the only president that has advocated a gun ban. "take the guns and figure out due process later"
The yes/no about "should Ukraine win the war" he wouldn't answer anything except that he would end the war. He would just give up Ukraine to Russia to end it, though, and he didn't want to say that on TV.
That's true on a technicality, but everyone knows what he meant. In the 2020 election, Biden got ~7 million more votes than Trump in addition to winning the electoral college. Trump's intent was to be intentionally misleading and to twist the qualifications to imply that he should have won last time when, in fact, he didn't.
The first time the moderators countered his obvious dog-whistle lies I was absolutely blown away. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Then I started laughing and didn't stop.
The correction was really well done and completely natural by both moderators, I almost didn't register what happened. Love to see it.
My favorite moment from the whole thing was when Harris offhandedly mentioned that his rallies were bad, and he spent a full minute of his rebuttal time insisting that his rallies were awesome, then started arguing with the moderators when they fact checked him. You could see that that, above everything else that went on, rankled him. It really highlighted the narcissism.
Too bad they let him continue to lie about the thing they just fact checked, let him talk beyond his allotted time, reapond when it wasn't his turn, and shut down Harris the one time she tried to respond out of turn.
The moderators crossed an extremely low bar on fact checking last night, but did everything else the same way they always have.
All his talking didn't help him at all. I don't think the Harris side cared about him self-destroying his image and giving lots for the talk shows later to make fun of.
It's complicated, since the Harris campaign wanted him to have more opportunities to ramble, interrupt and get mad. They were very much counting on him being himself and comparing that to someone who can speak in coherent sentences without getting mad.
He shut her down twice. The one time was really over the line. But I loved the moderator saying there is no place in the USA that executing babies is legal. Wtf, 9 month abortions? Lol
I support it. They have a job to let viewers know that the radical information is not true, and they should not take it as valid information to get worked up over.
It's the difference between Trump sounding like a maniac vs exposing a controversy. They don't need to stop him from sounding like a maniac. They just need to clarify that he is, in fact, a maniac.
That really showed what a shitbag outfit CNN has become under it’s new conservative ownership group. They are a wolf in sheep’s clothing now.
“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” he said. Then he suggested a model: “Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have ‘news’ news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.”
Malone’s comments didn’t resonate much beyond a couple of places: At Fox News, which responded with glee, and inside CNN, where they sounded alarm bells.
—New board member and billionaire John Malone, a legend in the cable TV business and one who has deep and longstanding ties with David Zaslav
“The press is so dishonest in this country, it’s amazing,” Trump said. “Now, I didn’t mind because frankly I was pretty sure that’s what they would do. CNN was much more honorable—the debate we had with Biden was a much more honorably run debate.”
I felt better about the one where I creamed the senile old guy. The one where a younger, Black, WOMAN was awful.
He also said that the full context of his quotes on Charlottesville make it clear that what he’d said was “absolutely perfect.”
It was a perfect phone call!
Nevertheless, Trump claimed the evening had gone well for him. “I’ve been told I’m a good debater,” he said. “I think it was one of my better debates. Maybe my best debate.”
You're right, you've never done better. Way to go, shithead.