‘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.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      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.

      • expr@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        5 months ago

        I mean, there’s so much bullshit to use against them we hardly need to stoop to lies. The truth is already incredibly damning and is tearing them apart right now.

        • ChadCMulligan@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          5 months ago

          “Couch fucker” is catchy though, it rolls off the tongue, it’s easy to remember

          ‘Diaper Don and the couch fucker’ is a great response to ‘sleepy joe and low iq karolla’ or whatever tf trump is calling her

          — it sucks that this is where American political discourse is, but this is where THEY brought it to. Taking the high road isn’t a virtue when dealing with a bully and it isn’t effective.

        • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          5 months ago

          The thing about lies is that they demonstrably work a lot better than the truth on the segment of voters we need to reach. They’re practically begging to be lied to, so I say give them what they want. If they wanted the truth, it would be extremely easy for them to find it.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          5 months ago

          “When they go low, we go high” almost never works in politics. So good luck telling people that they’re smearing poor J.D. Vance with a terrible lie.

          • expr@programming.dev
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            5 months ago

            I’m not saying we go high. By all means, rip into them. The Harris campaign is doing a great job of that, using the truth. There’s so much ammunition that the lies are just a drop in the bucket and serve no real purpose other than distortion. It’s just pretty pointless.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              5
              ·
              5 months ago

              and serve no real purpose other than distortion.

              Dude, I just showed you that Jesse Watters devoted airtime to getting upset about it. So that’s demonstrably untrue.

              • borf@lemmynsfw.com
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                5 months ago

                Also, it creates social media engagement much like this thread, so that whether or not somebody believes the truth (that JD personally documented the experience of losing his virginity to a musty piece of furniture) they’re still engaging with the idea the whole time they read and respond. That’s called memetic fitness.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  3
                  ·
                  5 months ago

                  And every moment spent by Republicans defending Vance against this rumor is a moment not spent on campaigning for Trump.

              • Optional@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                5 months ago

                I hear what expr is saying though - several Democratic-voting people I know actually thought it was real in the initial scrum of the meme. That part I’m not so big on. Everyone going wink-wink-nudge dude fucked a couch is fine.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  arrow-down
                  1
                  ·
                  5 months ago

                  What difference does it make if they think it’s real? I don’t see how that makes a difference in the grand scheme of things. People believe much sillier things that aren’t true all the time.

                  • Optional@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    2
                    ·
                    5 months ago

                    I’d prefer my own political party to believe truthful things. Despite the wild success the reverse has shown in other parties.

                    Call it a quirk.

            • Kaput@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              edit-2
              5 months ago

              The rest of the world can’t do shit about your elections. And it’s scary as hell. So please keep throwing shit around it make the train wreck more entertaining.

    • MagicShel@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      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.