Mr. Trump (The Donald) To Win in 2024

[wayneL]

Do people believe the media anymore without question?
Someone is watching this crap.

Yes, but fewer and fewer, almost nobody less than 70

 

[farmerge]

Do people believe the media anymore without question?
Someone is watching this crap.

Only the true believers of each side. Which side generates the most b/s is debatable.

 

[moXJO]

Prime example:

 

[farmerge]

Prime example:

View attachment 182576

I guess if the workers in the hospitality industry were payed a real wage that could support them, then the tips that they reciece to bolster their income would be out the window.
All foreign to me where we have a "liveable' salary payed for the hours worked.

 

[basilio]

I have discovered The Bulwark of late. This is a conservative anti-Trump political commentary website.
This story offers an interesting insight into the emotions behind how politicians are perceived by the public.

Certainly gave me something to think about. The two weeks since this story was written have shown how Kamales Harris and then Tim Walz have drawn a ton of "heat"

Pro-Wrestling Explains Why Trump Is Scared of Kamala​

We’ve got a Yes Movement brewing.​

Jonathan V. Last
Jul 30, 2024
∙ Paid



(The Bulwark / Midjourney)

1. Trump as Vinnie Mac​

​

We are seeing signs of panic from Donald Trump because he recognizes something in Kamala Harris that he has not seen in any other opponent: The beginnings of a cultural movement that vibrates at a level beyond politics.

He sees that Kamala Harris is drawing heat.

To explain this concept, we’re going to have to go deep into professional wrestling. This one’s going to be a journey. So strap in.

---

To understand Trump, you must understand professional wrestling.1 Trump has long ties to the WWE and Vince McMahon, and Trump’s forays into wrestling formed his understanding of how populism and demagoguery function.

Here is how wrestling works:

The WWE was the creation of one man: Vince McMahon. McMahon was the Barnum of wrestling. Until recently, he alone decided who won and who lost, which characters were pushed and which faded into obscurity.

McMahon could be vindictive and capricious in his decisions, but at the most basic level he was guided by the audience. If a wrestler resonated with the crowd, McMahon would give them more work and elevate their standing. If a wrestler McMahon favored didn’t get a reaction, he would eventually sideline the wrestler or remake the character.

It is important to understand that the reaction McMahon looked for was value-neutral. It does not matter if the crowd loves a wrestler or hates him. In wrestling parlance this reaction is referred to as “heat” and there are two kinds of heat: (1) Heel heat, which is hatred and loathing on the part of the audience against villainous characters (known as “heels”). And (2) Face heat, which is love and adulation for heroic characters (known as “faces,” short for “babyfaces”).2

A wrestler’s most important job is to draw heat from the audience and it does not matter if the audience is booing or cheering. What matters is that they are loud and active.3 What matters is that the crowd cares.

---

Heat has been Trump’s political lodestar.

It explains why he pursued the Obama-birther story so doggedly even before he was running for president. It explains why he stopped talking about Operation Warp Speed. He’s even talked about heat explicitly, making fun of Republican audiences who yawn when he mentions about tax cuts but go crazy when he does trans issues.

In his lizard brain, Trump sees drawing heat as the pathway to dominating the culture and thus winning elections.

In this way, Trump is a savant. He has drawn heel heat more successfully than any figure in the history of American politics and used that power to take complete ownership of a political party.

---

So from Trump’s perspective, you can understand why he was so vexed by Joe Biden in 2020. No one really cared about Biden,4 who drew no heat, one way or the other. Biden was just kind of there, taking moderate positions and running a boring, effective campaign operation.

In Trump’s mind, his loss to Biden was the political equivalent of Hulk Hogan dropping the championship belt to some forgettable, mid-card talent. That’s not supposed to happen.5

Share

---

2. Kamala as Daniel Bryan​

​

Kamala Harris has succeeded—suddenly, unexpectedly—in drawing tremendous amounts of heat.

The first indication was her fundraising in the 24 hours following Biden’s withdrawal. Then there was her campaign launch in Milwaukee, where a crowd of more than 3,000 packed a fieldhouse and went crazy for her. There have been Kamala memes organically flooding the internet and now the weird, meetup style Zoom calls (Black Women for Harris, White Dudes for Harris) that have become sensations—organizing voters, raising millions of dollars, and rallying celebrities to her cause.

These are the kinds of indicators that Donald Trump understands and they signal that Harris is close to achieving escape velocity where she draws so much heat that she ceases to be an ordinary politician and becomes a larger cultural figure.6

And that is the one kind of opponent Trump fears.

---

This phenomenon has happened in wrestling before.

Traditionally, the pinnacle of the industry has been occupied by a specific kind of wrestler: The enormous, bulging, charismatic figure.

Hulk Hogan. Randy Savage. The Rock. Steve Austin. John Cena. Triple H.

Those wrestlers are very different characters, but they share the same DNA and come from the same lineage within the industry. You watch them and think: That’s what a WWE champ looks like.

Now let me tell you the story of Daniel Bryan.

---

Daniel Bryan does not look like your typical wrestler. He’s short. He’s not especially muscular. He’s from the Pacific Northwest and looks it. Bryan is a vegan and an environmentalist. In 2016, he voted for Jill Stein. He spent much of his career wrestling on the indie circuit.


Daniel Bryan in 2013. (Krystal Bogner, Wikimedia Commons)
But in 2013, Bryan was doing a stint in the WWE and the crowd went nuts for him. Out of nowhere, he began drawing insane levels of heat.

Vince McMahon didn’t know what to do with this, because McMahon has always believed that what the audience wants are mainstream, muscle-bound behemoths, not weird-looking indie acts.

McMahon tried to bury Bryan on the card, but the crowd reactions were just too big. Bryan would walk into the ring and the audience would go bananas for the guy. You’ve got to see it to understand the energy.


It all became so much that McMahon was forced to relent and follow his audience. He elevated Bryan to the top of the card and gave him the championship belt at Wrestlemania 30. And it was the right call, because it’s what the crowd demanded. The voice of the people could not be ignored.

Again: Look at the pop from this stadium when Bryan finally got the belt and you will understand why McMahon had to give him the championship or risk losing the audience.

---

Not to put too fine a point on it, but when Donald Trump looks in the mirror, he sees Vince McMahon. And when he looks at Kamala Harris, he sees Daniel Bryan.

He sees a candidate who wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place.

Who doesn’t look the part.

Who isn’t what the crowd is supposed to want.

But he also sees a candidate who is in the process of drawing enormous amounts of heat and assembling a popular movement of people who really want her.

And Trump is a shrewd enough demagogue to understand that once the culture moves in that way, it will not be denied.

Leave a comment

---

3. Yes!​

​

From a Rolling Stone profile of Daniel Bryan:

Backstage at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, five hours before a late March taping of WWE’s Monday Night Raw, Daniel Bryan, the unlikeliest of wrestling heroes, settles into a chair in guest host Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s dressing room. The hulking ex-Governator, who has yet to arrive, possesses the physique one expects to see milling about these premises. Ditto for 6’5″, 235-pound, current WWE World Heavyweight Champion Randy Orton, who’s chatting up female competitor and E! Total Divas star Nikki Bella down the hall. Bryan, by contrast is a mere 5’8″, weighs less than 200 pounds and − with his shaggy shoulder-length hair, rustic beard, flannel button-down and eco-friendly Toms shoes − looks like, say, a member of Band of Horses who showed up at the arena on the wrong day.

But make no mistake, 2014 is Bryan’s time. The 32-year-old Aberdeen, Washington native, who’s engaged to WWE starlet Brie Bella (also currently seen on Total Divas) and who will take on Triple H at Wrestlemania XXX on April 6th, has engineered a connection with wrestling fans unseen since Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the late Nineties. Except where Johnson boasted about delivering smackdowns, or his contemporary, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, bragged of opening cans of whoop-ass, Bryan’s popularity has spawned a much simpler, cuddlier catchphrase: “Yes!”

“When you look at Austin, if he’d happened in different eras, he would have been hated,” reasons Bryan about his current zeitgeistiness. “Hulk Hogan, if he came out now saying, ‘America, take your vitamins,’ and he’s this jacked-up dude, you would get people going, ‘Wait, what? I hate this guy.’ To me, it’s whether you fit into the atmosphere.”
Fortunately for Bryan, topics such as sustainable living and veganism, both squarely in his philosophical wheelhouse, have become part of the mainstream conversation. And with his jacked-but-not-gross-jacked physique and relatable, earthy aesthetic, as well as his presence in WWE anti-bullying campaigns and underdog appeal, Bryan has become a grassroots success — he’s wrestling’s first artisanal star.
But it wasn’t until 2012, after almost 15 years of professional scuffling, that Bryan stumbled on his game-changing catchphrase. An avid mixed martial arts fan, he semi-satirically adopted fighter Diego Sanchez’s ritualistic, pre-match repetition of “Yes!” — goofily hoisting his index fingers in the air each time he said it. Suddenly, in the tradition of Ric Flair’s “Woo,” Bryan had a trademark call-and-response to go along with his growing confidence and skill in the ring.
“The whole arena was chanting, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!'” Bryan recalls of the night that same year when he realized fans had latched on to his motto. “I didn’t predict it; I didn’t plan it. It just happened, and you feel lucky to be a part of it.”

Read the whole thing.

1
An excellent place to start is Josie Riesman’s book Ringmaster, which is both a biography of Vince McMahon and history of recent American politics.
2
There is a third kind of heat, known as “go-home heat.” We’ll get to that in a minute.
3
Heat is so determinative in wrestling that the crowd reactions can change the direction of a character. For instance: The Rock’s character was originally conceived as a heel. He drew enormous heat, but it wasn’t heel heat. It was face heat. The audiences loved him, even though his character was supposed to be a bad guy.
So McMahon reconfigured the Rock’s character to make him a face, so that the character’s direction aligned with the audience reaction.
4
Aside from me, obviously. I was the lone guy in the crowd with a Joe Biden / Brooklyn Brawler sign.
5
An aside on JD Vance: I would bet the milk money that Trump is concerned that JD Vance is drawing the third kind of heat, a phenomenon known as “go-home heat.”
Go-home heat is when the crowd dislikes the character at a meta level and their jeers are not because they are rooting against the character, but because they want to see less of the character. It’s the most feared audience reaction in the business and JD Vance is absolutely drawing go-home heat.
Trump must sense that.
6
Prediction: Trump will lose his mind when the Democratic convention TV numbers dwarf the Republican convention’s numbers.


-----------------------------------------------------
A quick Wrestling clip of Daniel Bryan. I haven't followed wrestling for 50 years so I was impressed with some of these moves.

 

[Bellcose]

I have discovered The Bulwark of late

Tim Miller is pretty reasoned being previously a strategist on Republican campaigns but he tends to rehash by applying his Republican thoughts to the Democratic party decisions. Interesting sometimes though.

As for this fella, tell us what you really think.

 

[Dona Ferentes]

why are all these old white privileged males shouting at me?

 

[basilio]

Tim Miller is pretty reasoned being previously a strategist on Republican campaigns but he tends to rehash by applying his Republican thoughts to the Democratic party decisions. Interesting sometimes though.

As for this fella, tell us what you really think.

LOVE, Love Rick Wilson to death. Hos work on the Bulwark, in Resolute Square and of course The Lincoln project is elite.
As you point out "tell us what you really think"

 

[farmerge]

why are all these old white privileged males shouting at me?

@Dona Ferentes I don't know as I am partially deaf, She says.

 

[Knobby22]

Tim Miller is pretty reasoned being previously a strategist on Republican campaigns but he tends to rehash by applying his Republican thoughts to the Democratic party decisions. Interesting sometimes though.

As for this fella, tell us what you really think.

He has a way with words. I love his finishing statement. Impressed. Proper intelligent Republicans.

 

[Garpal Gumnut]

Old man Trump won't stick to message and the polling shows he may lose Pennsylvania. Anyways he always knows better than anyone else.

Crazeeee daze.

gg

 

[farmerge]

Old man Trump won't stick to message and the polling shows he may lose Pennsylvania. Anyways he always knows better than anyone else.

Crazeeee daze.

gg

There are enough mad men in the world at the top of the pile, we don't really need another loon up there with them.

 

[wayneL]

So you'd prefer a drunken puppet, controlled by genuinely mad men?

 

[IFocus]

There are enough mad men in the world at the top of the pile, we don't really need another loon up there with them.

And TBH at 78 Trump is well past it with a bit of pressure he is showing signs of it.

 

[farmerge]

So you'd prefer a drunken puppet, controlled by genuinely mad men?

Nah Wayne just some sanity.

 

[wayneL]

Nah Wayne just some sanity.

Sanity may be relative. As much as Trump has personally quirks, the other candidate is monumentally more worrisome, once one delves past the appeal, or not, of each individual's personality.

One must look at policy positions, both historical and proposed, economic and social. The choice being effectively a binary one, American must choose between Harris or Trump.

Additionally one must look beyond the media narrative and political propaganda. I posit that almost nobody outside of the US has done so, falling for edited sound bites and the biased opeds of ideologically possessed columnists.

The question then becomes, what would America look like under each of these candidates and *their administration*?

One's opinion of such can only be valid once one has actually gone through the analysis as described above, and never because of soundbites.

Listen to each of their speeches, and their interviews IN FULL, unadorned and unedited, otherwise people are just parroting what certain groups want you to believe.

 

[farmerge]

Sanity may be relative. As much as Trump has personally quirks, the other candidate is monumentally more worrisome, once one delves past the appeal, or not, of each individual's personality.

One must look at policy positions, both historical and proposed, economic and social. The choice being effectively a binary one, American must choose between Harris or Trump.

Additionally one must look beyond the media narrative and political propaganda. I posit that almost nobody outside of the US has done so, falling for edited sound bites and the biased opeds of ideologically possessed columnists.

The question then becomes, what would America look like under each of these candidates and *their administration*?

One's opinion of such can only be valid once one has actually gone through the analysis as described above, and never because of soundbites.

Listen to each of their speeches, and their interviews IN FULL, unadorned and unedited, otherwise people are just parroting what certain groups want you to believe.

Fortunately we don't have to vote for either Trump or Harris.
There are enough no hopers here in Australia serving up liberal amounts of their own b/s.

 

[wayneL]

Fortunately we don't have to vote for either Trump or Harris.
There are enough no hopers here in Australia serving up liberal amounts of their own b/s.

Too true

 

[farmerge]

Too true

Got to be off and start work now the drizzle appears to be finished

 

[wayneL]

They will cheat, one way or another.