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The double standard for Harris and Trump has reached a breaking point | One candidate can rant about gibberish while the other has to be perfect.

Something is wrong with this split-screen picture. On one side, former president Donald Trump rants about mass deportations and claims to have stopped "wars with France," after being described by his longest-serving White House chief of staff as a literal fascist. On the other side, commentators debate whether Vice President Kamala Harris performed well enough at a CNN town hall to "close the deal."

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Let’s review: First, Harris was criticized for not doing enough interviews — so she did multiple interviews, including with nontraditional media. She was criticized for not doing hostile interviews — so she went toe to toe with Bret Baier of Fox News. She was criticized as being comfortable only at scripted rallies — so she did unscripted events, such as the town hall on Wednesday. Along the way, she wiped the floor with Trump during their one televised debate.

Trump, meanwhile, stands before his MAGA crowds and spews nonstop lies, ominous threats, impossible promises and utter gibberish. His rhetoric is dismissed, or looked past, without first being interrogated.

217 comments
  • I'd love nothing more than to see her just spend an hour straight laying into Trump and Vance with f-bomb strewn attacks and continuous heavy-handed insults. I think she'd probably convert some Republicans if she did that.

  • Ended wars with France? Like when we deserted Afghanistan and left them in the mess we created?

    • It's not as if it was a beacon of prosperity and joy before the US came in. I'm not sure it arguably got better/worse during the time... It was different for the US occupation, and now it's back where it started. Lives lost, people traumatized, money thrown away, but at least some corpos got rich and PMC's had their babtism of fire... Onto the next one.

    • Just one more year of occupation bro. I promise bro just one more year and it'll fix everything bro. Bro. Just one more year. Please just one more. One more year and we can fix this whole problem bro. Bro cmon just give me one more year I promise bro. Bro please I just need one more year.

      Liberals oppose war challenge level: impossible.

  • Trump is targeting mostly far-right evangelicals who have a common vision on what they want the country to look like. He has a lot of energy when doing so, and because of how similar their interests are he could get away with all sorts of stuff and they would still vote for him.

    Harris (and Democrats in general) is the only alternative mainstream candidate that everyone else has, and that "everyone else" consists of all sorts of people with conflicting interests: liberals, neoliberals, centrists, progressives, leftists, different religious groups or cultures, varying economic demographics, racial minorities, LGBTQ, and immigrants for instance. They're trying to appeal to all of them at once, but because they don't have a shared vision, nobody is happy and they get more scrutinized. To make at least some of them happy, they need to focus on certain groups and deprioritize the interests of other groups. However, once they do that then the groups they deprioritize get angry since they no longer have representation, and the groups that are still there remain skeptical because of the history of not working for their interests in the past.

    The advantage that third parties like PSL have is that from the start, they're trying to appeal to a specific group of people with a common vision like Trump is instead of trying to play both sides with conflicting groups and making nobody happy. The problem (aside from the election duopoly bought out by corporations) is that they are a very small political minority so they have no real chance of winning the election without winning over people from other groups which is a challenge, especially when there are many more unknowns when it comes to progressing than there are when it comes to reverting to a previous state so there is more fragmentation due to those sort of disagreements.

217 comments