‘Donald Trump is losing his marbles,’ former Congressman and Republican Adam Kinzinger said

Republicans are concerned that party leader Donald Trump is having a “public nervous breakdown” after he made a series of offensive outbursts about Vice President Kamala Harris as he slips behind her in the polls.

The former president has made a number of  insulting personal attacks against his Democratic rival since she moved to the top of the ticket. Last week, Trump questioned Harris’s racial identity  at the National Association of Black Journalists conference. Over the weekend, he accused Harris of having a “low IQ.”

New polls indicate Trump is slipping behind the vice president in the popular vote and races are tightening in battleground states.

“This is what you would call a public nervous breakdown,” Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump state department appointee, told Politico.

  • snooggums@midwest.social
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    5 months ago

    Has his behavior changed? Trump seems to be spouting the same kind of nonsense he always has. This just seems to be more of the same weird rants.

    • borf@lemmynsfw.com
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      5 months ago

      The behavior hasn’t substantially changed, but the narrative is shifting. Trump took office on the back of a wave of sardonic, nihilistic memes. He was constantly excused for being bigoted and unintelligible because his dork enlightenment cronies could cynically spin everything as nine dimensional water backgammon. The fact they weren’t making sense was a plus, not a minus.

      Biden dropping out and team Kamala stepping up so hard so fast on the meme front has completely taken the right by surprise. They weren’t mobilized to defend against this. So now they’re on the back foot, the memes from the mainstream left are sharper and meaner than Trumpworld has ever had to deal with before, and the messaging is laser focused.

      Spouting nonsense only works if it looks like you’re winning by doing so. Don just keeps showing how old, tired, and weak he really is, so the cracks are forming. Just think of all the political capital he’s spent trying to make diapers cool, and then he makes a VP pick who Snopes has confirmed literally fucked a couch on live video.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Get out of here with this fake news! There’s no video! This is just a hit on Vance!

        Again, there is no video of J.D. Vance fucking a couch. He only wrote about it in his autobiography (chapter 11, page 180).

                  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                    5 months ago

                    Yes. I am saying America should be convinced that J.D. Vance fucks couches.

                    Because that’s what you do when the opponents do things like say your candidates turned black all of a sudden or that he wasn’t born in the United States.

                  • MagicShel@programming.dev
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                    5 months ago

                    There are two kinds of people: those who understand it’s juvenile humor and are just memeing on it for funsies, and those who don’t understand that and are never going to be high information voters and JD Vance fucks couches must just be the message that gets them to vote.

                    My optimism in humanity leads me to believe there are very few of the latter. What I’m certain of is the joke does no harm and is a silly little meme. President Trump was a silly little meme in 2015 but then Hillary ran the worst campaign in living memory (Kamala saved Biden from that dubious distinction), and here we are. So I’m okay with it, but obviously it has no place in serious conversation except to inject some laughs.

      • commandar@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        dork enlightenment

        I have no idea how I’ve never seen this up to now, but good god that’s the perfect encapsulation of that particular sect of morons.

      • Wytch@lemmy.zip
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        5 months ago

        Agree with both above parent comments, but what can they hope to gain by starting to point out his meltdowns now? Do they think they can convince him to step down as well? To change his rhetoric?

        • MagicShel@programming.dev
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          5 months ago

          Possibly just distancing themselves from Trump to position themselves for a post-Trump world. Normally its only retirees who don’t face reprisal from Trump or voters that speak out anyway.

    • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.net
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      5 months ago

      The best time to wake up to that Donald Trump is a weird racist who should be ignored was 1988. The second best time is now

      • Optional@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        “I think we’re starting to see the old Trump that a lot of Republicans got tired of in 2020, got tired of defending him,”

        Oh are they tired of defending a traitorous rapist conman? They’re tired of defending a sociopath and grotesque manbaby for the singular purpose of jamming through the most regressive laws and judges anyone could imagine? Awwww. Poor lot of republiQans.

        • Sc00ter@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          Let’s not be fooled. They defended him because he could help them. Now that he’s not polling as favorably, trump has less to offer for their support

        • Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Why should they be tired? After scouring the nation for the person who most accurately represents them, conservatives have consistently chosen Trump as the one who most closely reflects their sentiments. He is their accurate reflection.

          They’ve re-affirmed their leader for eight solid years now. They get to own this and they should never be thought of apart from him. Just as nazis are always associated with Hitler, Republicans should always be associated with Trump. Always.