Happy Friday!
We made it!
And MAN did you have questions about the week that was in politics — 83 as of this writing!
I love it. It shows we have an engaged and curious community, which has always been my top priority.
Obviously I am not going to answer all 83 questions here. But I will do my best to answer a bunch. And I will answer even more at 1 pm eastern today when I do a livestream on my YouTube channel. Check it out!
Ok, let’s get to it.
Q: How do you explain the growth in numbers in terms of people who say Trump doesn’t lie, that he was a good president, etc.? I know you wrote about it this week, but I’m hoping you can share more perspective. Who are these people who seemingly once believed Trump lied all the time, and now they don’t? That doesn’t make any sense. I get being frustrated with Biden and perhaps thinking maybe Trump won’t be as bad as people say in a second term. But how does a rational person go from this guy is a compulsive liar to I believe what he’s saying?
A: GREAT question and a really good place to start.
Here’s how I think about it. Let’s say you date someone for two years. You break up. But then, say 18 months later, you are single. And thinking about your past love life. And that person who you dated for two years. Chances are you don’t remember all the bad stuff — all the stuff that led you two to break up. You reminisce about the good times you had. You find yourself missing that person.
That’s what is going on with Trump and at least some voters. They have memory-holed all (or a lot) of the bad stuff he did and are choosing to remember his tenure through the lens of what they believed they liked. They have convinced themselves that things were better under Trump than Biden. (That is extremely debatable.)
The job of the Biden campaign in these coming months — and they are already doing it — is to remind people that, no, things weren’t great under Trump. Remind them of all the bad stuff that led them to break up with him in the first place.
Q: What would you say (about politics) - if anything- if you were stuck in a broken elevator with a Trump supporter?
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