lol Most of the 'adversity' is stuff he's brought entirely on himself. The Fox machine has been bashing some people constantly for decades. trump is just kind of a baby--he's the first person to start slinging mud and also the first to pull out the how dare you line the minute he starts getting it back.

Fellas,,,is it gay to put thought into a political position before committing to ti?

Trump has been a lazy piece of **** on COVID. Biden would seriously address it.

Al Qaeda endorses Trump, in case you still like his “tough” foreign policy.

lol. i love when people think trump is some kind of "alpha male" in comparison.. trump whines and cries and lashes out whenever someone hurts his feelings. he holds grudges, refuses to confront anyone to their face, and talks **** about his detractors behind their backs/on twitter.. hes too scared to even fire his own people himself which was his whole crappy catchphrase.

he's mishandled/lost every single foreign policy situation that has come up during his term. The US has lost significant soft power in the world that will be very difficult to reacquire. a second trump term would solidify to our allies that we can't be counted on nor trusted on the world stage, which will have LONG lasting consequences.. LOL at thinking foreign policy is a position in which trump is better.

To an outsider (I'm not American) these seem like fair questions. I don't think Biden's a strong candidate at all.

If I were to vote in this election, I don't even know who I'd vote for (probably some random 3rd party dude as a protest), but if I voted Biden my main reason would be science. I'd be fairly confident that whatever crisis the world throws his way, he'd listen to science and have a panel of experts who know what they're doing and he'd listen to them. As opposed to Trump who doesn't listen to anyone and doesn't believe in science at all (see: covid, forest fires, global warming, etc).

Biden absolutely does appear a bit fazed every time he faces pressure in debates etc. But I'm not sure how well that reflects his ability to make decisions in the White House since most situations are about making rational decisions after pondering them for a while, it's not like other countries are shooting nukes at the US and Biden has to react within 0.2 seconds to save the US from armageddon. On the flipside Trump seems like the kind of person who acts first and thinks about it later, although I'll readily admit this might just be me reading too much left-wing media.

Also, Biden does seem like a good guy who really just wants the best for everyone. It's a completely different question whether he's actually able to deliver results that improve people's lives, and I realize this is a sappy take, but I would tend to sympathize with the candidate who seems capable of empathy and is thus more likely to at least *try* doing the right thing.

Lastly, if I were American, I'd be pretty damn tired of the polarization at this point. Trump and crisises aren't a good combination because he just has no filter whatsoever and when he should try to suppress bad stuff happening like riots, covid spreading etc, all he's capable of doing is the opposite with his tweetstorms. I'm a peace-loving guy, and I'd personally prefer a president whose primary means of communication isn't Twitter and whose messages wouldn't tend to polarize people so much. In this regard, I'd prefer a nice old dude not doing much of anything at all as opposed to aggro "alpha" Trump dividing the country further apart.

1) it's honestly hard to take anyone seriously who uses "beta male" non-ironically.

2) Really? you can't think of anyone? I dunno, Abraham Lincoln? Just for starters? I suggest reading a book.

3) I couldn't care less if he is willing to fight if he's not fighting for me.

A lot of people think constantly bullshitting and bulling=alpha

Cite or get banned.

Yep, sounds like Trump to me.


Looney Tunes gunna Looney

paging lagtight to add the name of a Fortunate Son.

Can you even name a single thing Trump has been completely transparent about? On every single topic that comes before him the first instinct he has is ALWAYS to either hide the truth or to outright lie:

1) health care plan
2) his taxes
3) his covid tests
4) his health
5) his financial dealings
6) what he talked about with Putin
7) Russia collusion
8) Ukraine scandal
9) firing Comey
10) firing Mattis
11) path of a hurricane
12) anything and everything related to covid-19

And the list goes on and on and on. I mean Jesus Christ he was asked Thursday about a negative test on the day of the first debate and the only thing anyone got was a bunch of bobbing and weaving that at best showed that he has no clue which days he is tested, if he even is at all. The guy's word is worth less than wet toilet paper.

So yeah, when it comes to Biden his biggest strength is that he might actually tell the truth about something. Four years and Trump hasn't done that once.

in the weekly newspaper? there were more important times in history no doubt but I was referring to the volume of criticism. The onslaught of criticism by way of the news and social media 24x7 didn't exist back then. Maybe there was some that encountered more but my point is he is used to an extreme and constant amount of pressure.

It is a strange feature of modern conservatism that they seem to think the pressure of hostile media scrutiny is so much worse than the pressure a president faces when fighting a war, or trying to get out of a recession or depression, or trying to unite a divided country. The triumph of politics as celebrity worship.

For instance, I would say that Obama was under more pressure when he was elected due to the financial crisis than the pressure Trump gets from the media. Bush was under more pressure in responding to 9/11.The most pressure Trump has actually faced comes from leading America's response to the pandemic, and he has clearly cracked under that pressure.

adding to that..... self-induced mostly as well.

If Trump simply refused to spend so much time spewing the FakeNews conspiracy.... and spent more time governing......

But to him I suspect it is MUCH more image than substance. ldo

I assume that he was positive because he would have been quick to say he was negative if that was the truth. If he was positive, telling the truth would swing votes in Bidens direction which would be a detractor against him winning. In my mind, it doesn't make sense for him to tell the truth if he was in fact positive.

I think lot of Trumps antics are smoke and mirrors with the underlying goal to improve his political position / gain media attention. If telling the truth isn't conducive to him winning, he won't do it (nor should he).

Do we really want a President who would be prone to laying all our cards on the table face-up when dealing with powerhouses like China?

I guess the difference is, a lot of Trumps antics that people find offensive I don't take that seriously. My speculation is that Trump campaign is smart and there is an agenda behind the craziness (most of the time).

Yes, I would. Trump views negotiations as zero-sum, where one person winning means the other loses, and so thinks the goal is to trick his opponents. My view is that international government negotiations are generally positive-sum, and so better done where each side is clear about their goals and focus on mutually beneficial deals. Basically, try to find Coasean bargains with low transaction costs.

That is not a feature of conservatives but myself. I would say that you are right and the situations you presented are more stressful than social media etc. It was just the first thing that came to mind. I'm not sure how Trump did on the COVID response to be honest as there are people on both sides saying opposite things and hard to sort through the fluff. It's hard to measure what the results would have been with a different president.

All of Trump's policies and methods of governing? Seems like a pretty important thing to leave out of your post! How delusional do you have to be to think people only hate Trump as a person and he's not actually bad at his job?

Communist China: How many fighter gets do you have Joe?
Biden: To be honest, 62

Communist China: How many fighter gets do you have Donald?
Trump: a million and we are building a million more!

lol, no way do I want our President to be honest about that as we open ourselves to exploitation.

obviously the above is exaggerated and there is a certain amount of give and take in negotiations. but we should be using our leverage to get the good side of deals or always have a tertiary angle where we would have a net positive return. I'd much rather have a President who doesn't give in if he doesn't think a deal is good then someone who tries to be too fair.

It is of course difficult to know whether a different president would have done better than President Trump. We can think about counterfactuals by comparing the US to other countries (where the US looks pretty bad), but that is always inexact.

However, it is clear that as a leader Trump has done a poor job. He has failed to unite our country around a common response to defeating COVID. The federal government has done little to coordinate the response at the state level. His personal example has been, as it always is, awful, with him refusing to model good behavior with masks or social distancing, nor having any kind of message discipline on how seriously people should take COVID. He continually feuds with members of his own administration for saying things he thinks are bad for him politically about the pandemic.

I mean, everyone just accepts this stuff because Trump is Trump and we've gotten used to him being this way, but the fact that he failed the previous tests of leadership doesn't mean he isn't still failing them now.

Trump's caved in every negotiation he has tried. Pelosi ate his lunch on the shutdown, he got nothing and had to give her everything she wanted. Xi schooled him on tariffs, US trade deficit and farm bankruptcies at all time highs. He can't even get republicans to go along with his big pre-election stimulus etc etc etc. He's just too dumb to NOT get exploited in a semi-adversarial negotiation; Biden isn't.

what negotiations has Biden done well in?

What? Trump is a terrible negotiator. North Korea has walked all over him, using flattery to keep him distracted and giving in to them while their missile development continues unabated. He told Iran to **** off from a peace deal and thus accelerated their nuclear program as well. His antagonism towards China has been destructive towards both countries for no gain. He lies to the country and says "Mexico is paying for the wall" and "China is paying for this and that with tariffs" when neither of those statements are true, and his idiot supporters lap it up.

What planet do you live on where you think Trump is tough at this sort of thing? Utterly delusional.

What negotiations of any kind had Obama done before being president? Turned out he was a lot better at it than Trump. Most people randomly picked off the street would be. Donald Trump is terrible at his job. Reality television told you he was a good negotiator 15 years ago and you still believe that Hollywood fabrication today.

Then how come basically every single person of the tons that have worked for him have left with nothing good to say? If people thought they were seeing a brilliant operator working for the good of the country/people--you'd like to think they would've stuck around. Instead it's been whittled down to the yes men--which should tell you what kind of male donnie really is

Dude got handed a pretty stable situation and ran it into the ground.

Like suzzer just posted this in the other thread and it's ****ing perfect here:



Imagine thinking the guy whose word means nothing, because he just lies and makes **** up all the time on issues that have monumental importance to millions of people across the world, is a tough negotiator lmao

What does this made-up dialogue have to do with negotiating? This is again just the conservative model of politics being about media. "Trump says mean things about China on Twitter so he is a strong leader. Why isn't Biden mean enough in his public statements?" In actuality, Trump's China policy is a quixotic plan of unilaterally raising tariffs on China in an effort to lower our trade deficit with them. Also, weaken our alliances with the countries most worried about the rise of China by pulling out of the TPP and making it much more onerous to station our troops near China. Bad for China, but also bad for the US. Yay?

FWIW, it is probably more often to the benefit of the US for other countries to have a relatively accurate sense of the strength of our military. It is the strongest in the world, and we should take advantage of its deterrence effect. Wars have often been started because someone underestimated the the military strength of another country, even wars against the US.