Thread by @AlexandraErin

There's no such thing as a red state. Or a blue state; Trump's strategy (both within his campaign and by outside actors) in 2016 involved identifying and targeting key tipping point districts in "Democrat strongholds".

The targeting was as much Kushner's as Bannon's. I think I was clear enough that it wasn't Trump himself directing it.

Whether he expected to win or not, he certainly never intended to lose. I know why people like to think otherwise, but he needed to win.

Donald Trump is like 7/9ths of the way towards seizing total power in perpetuity and people are still really imagining him as a hapless boob who accidentally a whole presidency. I get why it's comforting, but it's not the comfort we need.

Among the reasons he's so desperate to maintain his stranglehold on executive power is that nobody in the history of the republic has NEEDED to be president as much as he has. Did he have fallbacks planned for if he lost? Sure. He's a cagey opportunist.

But running Trump TV wouldn't have given him the power to shield himself from investigations and prosecutions, nor would it have allowed him to service the debts that he can't ignore, from the people who gave him money not because they naively trusted him to return it.

He gets up on TV and says things like "The ballots are a DISASTER" and it's easy to think he's just being simple because... well, he is being simple. That's the absolute simplest possible way to communicate an idea. It's a DISASTER. It's a DISGRACE.

It works.

Yes, and the idea that he can't be expected to know how things work has been used all along as an alibi/excuse for doing things "his way". Procedural violations, clear crimes. "He just doesn't know how we do things."

We can say that Donald Trump is a failure of a businessman and by the measures we mean we'd be right, but he's been very successful at doing what he does. He doesn't care how many people think he's a failure (okay, it does needle him a bit) if it buys him the trappings of success

Because he knows how to use those trappings to fool other people into thinking he's successful and set up his next "failed" venture, while living large.

It's a strategy that is not infinitely sustainable but here he is much closer to the end of his life than the beginning and he has the trappings and powers of the most powerful person on the planet.

It's a great moment for any con artist when they see that knowing gleam in the mark's eye, the look that says, "Ah, I see what's happening here and now... now I've got you."

What comes next is usually the sting.

Same way he gets contractors and vendors to give him stuff on credit.

Because OF COURSE he's good for it. Why would The Donald NEED to cheat them or fight them over a couple hundred thousand? He's obviously loaded, right?

Donald Trump is neither playing chess in any number of dimensions nor is he staring vainly at the board trying to figure out when tic-tac-toe got so complicated.

He's walking into the chess tournament and going right to the table where the trophies are.

Is anybody going to stop him from just taking them? Did they have any kind of plan for if an important and successful-looking white man just takes a trophy? Sure, they might have some security, but did the security reckon with this scenario?

This is what he thinks of chess moves. Why bother with a complicated heist when so much of the functioning of the world depends on people just obeying lines and rules?

I've described him as a social engineering speedrunner. He identifies the shortest, fastest route to get what he wants and then he breaks the game to make it work, taking advantage of every hack and glitch he can along the way, not caring if he's using anything as intended...

...and not caring if it looks right or real or if the whole thing is an absurd spectacle to everybody it's not working on.

If THIS chess tournament has the gumption to throw him out, he'll go to the next one and take their trophy, until he finds one who lets him have one.

If you haven't read the story about him "winning" a golf tournament he didn't compete in by crashing a friendly game between the winner and his kid, ignoring his own trokes, taking the kid's shots as his own, and declaring himself the winner?

That's how he does everything.

Can't find it right now but here's a story rounding up his approach to golf.

golf.com/lifestyle/cele…

Golf is famously a "gentleman's game". Players are, for the most part, their own referees and scorekeepers. And he frequently owns the courses he's playing on.

People who play with him rationalize it: Donald being Donald. "You let him do it because now you have a story."

So of course he loves golf. Everybody else is playing the course first and against each other second. He's playing the whole concept of a sport, that there are rules for the game and rules of concept and social rules. Lines other people will stay within, he crosses.

And to him, this is a superpower.

People tell him, "You can't do that."

He asks, "Why?"

They say, "It's not done."

and he has identified another power he has, another weakness that suckers and losers have.

He knows what he's doing, is my point. He might not know how to do the thing that we all think someone should be doing, but what he's doing and what we think he should be doing aren't the same thing.

I'd say we underestimate him at our own peril but that feels redundant at this point, when we're surrounded by peril after so many people underestimated him.

I mean, in all honesty? I do think it's largely instinct. He does what he does because it usually works, works often enough to keep him going. And even though it's a brute force kind of approach, he's still angry every time it doesn't.

His rhetorical approach has gotten markedly simpler even just over the time he's been in office and you can see that as evidence of cognitive decline I guess but it could equally be the result of having a lot of opportunities to A/B test and find out what the bare minimum is.

Great, great, in two weeks, great, very soon now. Very strong. Very strongly.

Worst, terrible, disaster, disgrace.

He is fundamentally a very deeply lazy person, if for no other reason than because hard work is for suckers. When you're successful, you make other people work for you.

I'm not going to argue with medical experts who see evidence of decline, though I would ask how many times such an expert has predicted he will be absolutely out of commission by such and such a date, only for that date to pass and a new one to appear.

If he is in decline... the bad news is that it doesn't stop him from bulldozing his way towards whatever end he desires. His basic strategy of doubling down in the face of any opposition and make the other side actually stop him or back down doesn't take much.

Anyway, I am baking today, so here ends the thread.