re: #68 Timothy Watson

Trump could have also shifted the focus from PlagiarismGate to Pence’s acceptance speech, instead we now have process stories about Cruz’s speech.

He’s the opposite of “no drama” Obama. Every fucking time lately where he could have enjoyed a positive news cycle he’s instead chosen to do something to exacerbate and extend controversy. Nobody really gave that much of a shit over Melania’s plagiarized speech, I mean it was a thing but it really blew up over his campaign’s refusal to simply deal with it honestly, or even label it for what it was. Instead of letting Pence have a good night and conveying a sense of GOP party unity he chose to try and humiliate Ted Cruz, who, as a laboratory experiment to crossbreed snakes with shit to create the world’s first slithering turd, is genetically immune to embarrassment.

Trump can’t win because he STILL hasn’t figured out that the general election is an entirely new beast, with a completely different set of operating rules and electoral math that demands a fundamentally different game plan. Which is the problem, he never even had a game plan to begin with, it’s just been a seat of the pants exercise in winging it and being the biggest asshole imaginable.

It’s worked until now because Trump was able to secure the nominating race purely by abusing the shit out of other, mostly white male, craven cock-knockers accustomed to the bully-toadie-victim pecking order. Cruz is just the only one who calculated, correctly or not, that flipping him the finger at the convention was the solid long term play. Everyone else either stayed the fuck away (Bush, Kasich) or found some way to come to terms with the new order, either tacitly accepting (Rubio) or actively sucking up to Trump (Christie, Carson.)

But now shit is completely different and not only can’t he pivot, he still doesn’t recognize the need to pivot. The National Convention was his one real shot at selling himself as a general election candidate, able to pull the GOP together and present a cogent image of a viable statesman, capable of smoothly handing an inherently difficult to manage event. He’s utterly failed at this task. Even if he somehow manages to pull off Day 4 seamlessly, and let’s just say I’m not exactly sanguine on that score, he’s already presided over such a clusterfuck of historic proportions that it can’t possibly make up the deficit.