Helsinki--the Tipping Point?

[Dill]

(07-17-2018, 09:39 PM)hollodero Wrote: I don't know. To me, that depends on the bfines, Sunsets and SSF's etc. of this world, figures I of course regard as some kind of allegoric entities representing a certain part of America. Yeah not really, they are just dudes with brains, but I guess those will decide Trump's fate in the end. If they start to fully turn against him, the electoral majority will slip.

Will they turn? I doubt it. There's still Maxine Waters, and that would be what they'd have to turn to. And tomorrow Trump maybe bombs some bad folks that more or less deserve it, and Helsinki will be past and you and I are back to being called deranged again. It's not like Trump didn't go that route with Putin before. He already said that it could also have been Tschaina, that Putin assured him he didn't do it and that he gets offended by the allegations by now. Those statements probably aren't that much less worse, but pretty much forgotten still.

All the "deplorables" who do know exactly what Breitbart is are lost anyway. I see the "he could shoot a guy (or Comey) and not lose support" as pretty much accurate for those people. The narrative that the real crazy america-hating enemy is within the own country and votes blue runs far too deep and beats every possible argument from the start. I'm sure Breitbart etc. will soon discover that Russia is good, the radical leftists+MSM+deep state is hateful and warmongering and that's that. Good enough for sure.

Remember, the same was true in several instances before. And people always tought that's it. From Grabbing to Charlottesville etc. Always rock bottom, never a real problem.

I don't know. I agree with your perception of Trump, but Helsinki didn't really alter or change my mind about him to begin with. What drives those who didn't share our perspective on him before, I dare not say.

Then again, foxy lady and her friends had to sit through an awful, cringeworthy live interview with Trump and still managed to not be forever shamed and disgusted. And who gets through that can get through anything to come through for Trump.

Excellent points, as usual. (Though I'm pretty sure SSF will say he is NOT a Trump defender, just a guy who calls out "extremists" on "both sides," so he cannot turn against him.)

A celebrity p-grabber is still an alpha male, and Charlottesville showed Trump does not kow tow to political correctness. If you are hard right, you want a tough guy facing down Putin on the international stage, right? That's why you look past what wussy liberals call bad behavior. National security and strong leadership are a priority.

What I see different about Helsinki, though, is that it shows Trump as weak, a REAL strongman's *****, which is worse than incompetent to a base that generally does not prize or (sometimes) even recognize incompetence.  That was the First Diplomat and representative of the whole nation up there doing what Putin wanted, at the expense of his own government and people--something NO ONE on his own staff or in Congress or at Fox News would have done.

Also, when Fox runs a title like "Putin eats Trump's lunch," that is hard to walk back. Not as humiliating as getting beat by a girl, but Russia's leader is clearly the master of Trump as he never was of Obama. That has to trouble people who stress "strength" over competence. And most of all it troubles the unstable Trump who, if I am right about his personality, must now "punch back twice as hard," all around him but not at Putin, to show he is not weak. He might quiet down a day or two, as he did after the Hollywood access tape, but his staff and cabinet can expect the worst in weeks to come. (So I predict.) I am thinking his staff might also plan some tuff-sounding rhetoric for him over the next week to show he is not in Putin's pocket. Any real pushback will have to come from Congress though.