“I don’t even care who bones my wife, I can do her better than anyone and they all know it. It’s impossible for me to be jealous. She can’t even enjoy other men because of how great I am in bed anyway. Randy Ron is always getting my sloppy seconds, but ya know what she told me? She told me how much smaller he is than me. Like 2 inches long. And he finished in 30 seconds. Or 20 seconds. Pathetic.”
Headline: Trump so secure in his masculinity, he doesn’t even mind being cuckolded
He would say that all Republican politicians are degenerate wife-swappers. Then he would name David Vitter because everybody remembers him, one that everyone in D.C. all secretly knows but can't write about, a couple more in a dartboard-throwing way, Liz Cheney, and Mitt Romney. Then he would say that he made a mistake and let the degenerate swamp talk him into trying it out with Melania, and he still goes both ways honestly about whether it was a good idea, but after what happened with Ron in particular, his proclivities, well, it's water under the bridge and I'm the bigger man and the important thing is to serve America and help people.
I agree with the general spirit, but challenging Trump to a boxing match just seems too insane for even the Republican party. I think Desantis should be maximally vicious--especially in the debates. The ideal opening statement would be something like that:
"Let's be honest here--we've got two people, me and Trump. No one else is a contender--sorry Vivek Ranathamy or whatever the hell your name is. Now, I can understand why you'd vote for Trump if you like losing elections badly--because he seems to be very good at that. He lost to Biden, maybe the worst candidate ever, slow, incompetent, old, sort of like Trump himself--he's barely coherent, he stayed in his basement the entire time, and he still beat Trump and he beat him badly. He barely beat Hillary Clinton--Satan incarnate herself--and he lost the popular vote badly. The candidates that he endorsed got utterly slaughtered in the midterms. In contrast, we won by 20 points--the biggest margin in Florida ever. So if you're a Democrat voter hoping for four more years of Biden, who we know has beaten Trump very badly, then maybe vote for him, but if you care about winning elections and not losing to old, fat, incompetent crony politicians, it's obvious who your guy should be. This guy campaigned for years on building the wall, and then he got seduced by Washington cronies and couldn't build the wall. He said he'd deport millions of illegals--he failed at that. He failed at everything, including beating a literally rotting corps--Biden--in the general election."
Great statement. The DeSantis campaign should hire you. DeSantis needs to fight fire with lava.
Trump's most loyal fans will respond to that provocation by simply saying that Trump did in fact win and that the election was stolen. But non-loyalists can be swayed.
"He--like a lot of sore losers--claims his win was because of rigged elections. Now, there was some rigging--the Democrats played some dirty tricks. They also did that in Florida. But unlike with Trump, when they played dirty tricks on us, we won by the biggest margin ever--when they did the dirty tricks with him, he lost and he lost very badly. If you can't beat a rotting corpse plus a few shenanigans, you are an incompetent political leader, and you will lose and you deserve to lose."
"He did nothing to address how the election was actually rigged, as explicitly outlined in the Newsweek piece, 'the behind the scenes plan that fortified the election', and instead promoted crackpot nonsense".
The best reply to this is to say, "But Joe's still in the White House.
So either Joe Biden won fair and square, and Donald Trump is a loser. Or Joe Biden cheated and Donald Trump let him get away with it, so Donald Trump is a loser."
There's a danger here. Base voters dislike hearing them disparage each other. I think DeSantis needs to continue the strategy of avoidance until he's on a debate stage and let Trump keep shit talking until he says something really bad and THEN DeSantis unleashes righteous fury, calling him a loser that only knows how to fight Republicans and not Democrats. He can't come off as smirking, he needs to get angry. He needs to seem like Jesus throwing the money lenders out of the temple.
Leaning 100% into saying 'you failed though...' or 'where's the wall?' could be the rhetorical version of 'challenge him to a fight' tbh. As an aside, while I won't fight you too hard on the machismo aspect of Trump's appeal, I think his true support derives from 2016 being the closest thing to a nativist movement in recent memory.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. Constantly call him a loser and a failure. You failed to build a wall. You hired a bunch of losers. You presided over massive losses by the republican party. Just belittle him constantly.
The point of challenging him to a physical fight is that it forces Trump to back down. Calling him a loser is great but he will just unleash a torrent of bs like he always does and by the end of it no one even remembers what the question was. Offering a challenge that Trump can't meet is different.
The 'strong DeSantis' playbook is pretty easy to write. He could bait Trump into complaining about the 2020 election being stolen, and then say 'doesn't matter, still an excuse, you still couldn't get it done, meanwhile I passed stronger voter laws in my state and will coordinate with all other red states to strengthen theirs".
DeSantis has slowly but steadily been turning up the heat on Trump since he came in. But keep in mind that a lot of his campaigning has been in Iowa, where he's trying to win over evangelical voters. Winning Iowa is key to his chances, and just trashing Trump isn't the way to get them.
In general, since there are many voters who like Trump but are still persuadable, it makes sense to bait Trump into saying deranged things and then punch back. That appears to be the strategy.
He's so far behind that he needs to go all in and run a full court press on Trump's record. DeSantis is the proverbial 15-seed taking on Duke who needs a gimmick and has no shot in a fundamental match-up
I actually said this to friends about Jeb in 2016. Insulting his wife should’ve been the last straw. Decking him on stage and saying screw it to the Presidency would’ve not only been doing right by his family but it would’ve exposed Trump for what he is - a lousy loudmouth - to everyone, including his fans.
I think you understand the Trump voter far less than you claim to.
Wanting an outsider doesn't make people stupid, it makes them smart.
I voted for Trump and I am neither the rube nor the idiot you suggest I am.
I I think DeSantis is the better choice. But only because the Democrats will cheat worse than the USSR used to and 10x worse than in 2020, if Trump is the GOP candidate. Democrats, the deep state, and the MSM, have demonstrated already that they have zero morals about election cheating.
>But only because the Democrats will cheat worse than the USSR used to and 10x worse than in 2020, if Trump is the GOP candidate. Democrats, the deep state, and the MSM, have demonstrated already that they have zero morals about election cheating.
I'm with you, Optional. Richard's vision of Republicans as chimps laying around under a canopy evoked a gasp of shock followed by laughter (my typical response to stupidity and poop-throwing). HCL, while "any mass voter base is going to have their share of idiots", Hanania never speaks with any sort of recognition of the Democrat meerkats. Rather, he considers them intellectuals. Go figure.
Interesting proposal of a boxing match; it lines up with my opinion that the appeal of Trump has been an appreciation for a Rocky-esque figure's entrance into the political arena fighting on our behalf. I'm not even a fan of most sports, but like many Americans, I'm fed up with the affronts to our values and views by things like minimizing the alphabet indoctrination to flippant references to our reactions as "Dylan Mulvaney Hysteria." The word itself (hysteria) has a long historical pattern of being used to diminish and shut up people.
Personally, I'm confused by the yahoos in the Conservative camp who blindly follow Trump - and I know they're there. But if you're looking to label anyone with an political R behind their voting card a primate, you ought to at least have the honesty to include all the D's that would fill in their voting bubble with a vote for our current diminishing President, or our half-baked VP, as well.
West Virginia all day long. Like Braer Rabbit and Briar Patch. Whatever you do, don't make me live in those beautiful mountains with those honest people. I couldn't take it.
There is a real disconnect between Republican intellectuals and the base, especially after the Trump-led populist surge Republicans have had. National Review is still full of never-Trumpers holding on to William F. Buckley's fusionist ideas. This is why that panel of 8 intellectuals you mentioned in the article only provided bad solutions. It's not the party of Romney anymore. Some newer publications like American Affairs and the think-tank American Compass are trying to change that and provide an intellectual sheen to the populist GOP, but those outlets are hardly read by the people they claim to stand for.
I can definitely see this hypothetical boxing match being a boon to DeSantis. But I am also saddened by the fact that this is what it will take for DeSantis to beat Trump.
AFAIK, DeSantis has never talked about the fact that he could be the first Italian American president. "Meatball Ron" can be seen as anti-Italian insult. Perhaps DeSantis could try and frame it as defending his Italian heritage against Trump's attacks.
That's what I'm saying. Romney was the last candidate of the old GOP, the "we love corporations" GOP. The new GOP actively goes against corporations (e.g. Disney, Anheuser-Busch, Target).
The thing is that trump actually believes all the crazy things he says about how he’s in the best shape, he really won the ejection, etc- or at least the concept of something being true or not means nothing to him. Trying to outflank him in just blatant denial of reality is tough because most people have some remaining self awareness and end up backtracking or getting embarrassed when they try to steal from trumps playbook. Remember when Rubio tried to imply that trump has a tiny penis? He ended up basically apologizing for bringing the discourse down, mistakenly believing that voters value integrity. If he had really leaned into it and made penis size a key plank of his campaign he might have done better, but he just didn’t have the stomach for it. Desantis would face the same problem: he’s just not willing to divorce himself from reality enough to make up nonsense with the conviction he’d need to.
If DeSantis actually did this, it would be like an attention black hole consuming the internet. People make jokes about Trump being like a pro wrestler, but this would be a huge step towards WWE being real life.
Regardless of whether or not any of you like the things he says, Hanania is better at getting a reaction out of his own readers than anyone on substack.
"Those are exciting questions to conservative intellectuals but way too boring for the Republican masses. They will never tell a pollster this, but they resent anyone trying to make them think too hard, which is part of the reason they hate liberals in the first place."
Please stop trying to analyze Trump voters. Trump voters are looking for a fighter for a reason. Because people like you and the deep state need to be squashed. DeSantis does not have the appropriate level of rage to do so, he would forgive and accomodate you.
Was the 2020 election fair or is Trump Hitler? Pick one. If you leave a bank vault open over the weekend will the money still be there on Monday? What if there was no way to even check if the money is still there? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. IQ man, IQ. Think please.
I like DeSantis. I actually like almost all the candidates, left and right, EXCEPT for Biden. I think this is the first time in my life that we have a full slate of actual good candidates.
I hope this article makes its way to the DeSantis campaign. Not so Ron can literally fight Trump in the ring, but so his people understand the battleground.
I don't think he can do it. He's just too awkward. I watched parts of the Florida governor debate with Christie and he just doesn't come across well. I love his policy, but I don't think he's going to be able to hold a candle to Trump
I hate how much sense this makes.
“The best argument against democracy is five minutes with the average voter.”
-Winston Churchill
"The best argument for trial by combat is five minutes in the ring with the average politician."
- Goliath of Gath
Goodbye Rationalism. You had a good run.
DeSantis should have sex with Melania. There’s no coming back from that for Trump.
“I don’t even care who bones my wife, I can do her better than anyone and they all know it. It’s impossible for me to be jealous. She can’t even enjoy other men because of how great I am in bed anyway. Randy Ron is always getting my sloppy seconds, but ya know what she told me? She told me how much smaller he is than me. Like 2 inches long. And he finished in 30 seconds. Or 20 seconds. Pathetic.”
Headline: Trump so secure in his masculinity, he doesn’t even mind being cuckolded
He would say that all Republican politicians are degenerate wife-swappers. Then he would name David Vitter because everybody remembers him, one that everyone in D.C. all secretly knows but can't write about, a couple more in a dartboard-throwing way, Liz Cheney, and Mitt Romney. Then he would say that he made a mistake and let the degenerate swamp talk him into trying it out with Melania, and he still goes both ways honestly about whether it was a good idea, but after what happened with Ron in particular, his proclivities, well, it's water under the bridge and I'm the bigger man and the important thing is to serve America and help people.
Should be pretty easy to usher in the age of the AI election with a deepfake of Meatball Ron balling Melania. What a time to be alive!
I agree with the general spirit, but challenging Trump to a boxing match just seems too insane for even the Republican party. I think Desantis should be maximally vicious--especially in the debates. The ideal opening statement would be something like that:
"Let's be honest here--we've got two people, me and Trump. No one else is a contender--sorry Vivek Ranathamy or whatever the hell your name is. Now, I can understand why you'd vote for Trump if you like losing elections badly--because he seems to be very good at that. He lost to Biden, maybe the worst candidate ever, slow, incompetent, old, sort of like Trump himself--he's barely coherent, he stayed in his basement the entire time, and he still beat Trump and he beat him badly. He barely beat Hillary Clinton--Satan incarnate herself--and he lost the popular vote badly. The candidates that he endorsed got utterly slaughtered in the midterms. In contrast, we won by 20 points--the biggest margin in Florida ever. So if you're a Democrat voter hoping for four more years of Biden, who we know has beaten Trump very badly, then maybe vote for him, but if you care about winning elections and not losing to old, fat, incompetent crony politicians, it's obvious who your guy should be. This guy campaigned for years on building the wall, and then he got seduced by Washington cronies and couldn't build the wall. He said he'd deport millions of illegals--he failed at that. He failed at everything, including beating a literally rotting corps--Biden--in the general election."
Great statement. The DeSantis campaign should hire you. DeSantis needs to fight fire with lava.
Trump's most loyal fans will respond to that provocation by simply saying that Trump did in fact win and that the election was stolen. But non-loyalists can be swayed.
The reply to that is:
"He--like a lot of sore losers--claims his win was because of rigged elections. Now, there was some rigging--the Democrats played some dirty tricks. They also did that in Florida. But unlike with Trump, when they played dirty tricks on us, we won by the biggest margin ever--when they did the dirty tricks with him, he lost and he lost very badly. If you can't beat a rotting corpse plus a few shenanigans, you are an incompetent political leader, and you will lose and you deserve to lose."
"He did nothing to address how the election was actually rigged, as explicitly outlined in the Newsweek piece, 'the behind the scenes plan that fortified the election', and instead promoted crackpot nonsense".
The best reply to this is to say, "But Joe's still in the White House.
So either Joe Biden won fair and square, and Donald Trump is a loser. Or Joe Biden cheated and Donald Trump let him get away with it, so Donald Trump is a loser."
I think that's striking the right tone. Well done!
There's a danger here. Base voters dislike hearing them disparage each other. I think DeSantis needs to continue the strategy of avoidance until he's on a debate stage and let Trump keep shit talking until he says something really bad and THEN DeSantis unleashes righteous fury, calling him a loser that only knows how to fight Republicans and not Democrats. He can't come off as smirking, he needs to get angry. He needs to seem like Jesus throwing the money lenders out of the temple.
THIS!
Leaning 100% into saying 'you failed though...' or 'where's the wall?' could be the rhetorical version of 'challenge him to a fight' tbh. As an aside, while I won't fight you too hard on the machismo aspect of Trump's appeal, I think his true support derives from 2016 being the closest thing to a nativist movement in recent memory.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. Constantly call him a loser and a failure. You failed to build a wall. You hired a bunch of losers. You presided over massive losses by the republican party. Just belittle him constantly.
The "hired a bunch of losers" angle is a great attack especially given his turning on Kayleigh McEnany.
"You're either terrible at managing people or terrible at hiring people. Or both. Why not both?"
The point of challenging him to a physical fight is that it forces Trump to back down. Calling him a loser is great but he will just unleash a torrent of bs like he always does and by the end of it no one even remembers what the question was. Offering a challenge that Trump can't meet is different.
You underestimate Trump's ability to BS, and the loyalty of his followers. I'm with Richard on this one.
The 'strong DeSantis' playbook is pretty easy to write. He could bait Trump into complaining about the 2020 election being stolen, and then say 'doesn't matter, still an excuse, you still couldn't get it done, meanwhile I passed stronger voter laws in my state and will coordinate with all other red states to strengthen theirs".
DeSantis has slowly but steadily been turning up the heat on Trump since he came in. But keep in mind that a lot of his campaigning has been in Iowa, where he's trying to win over evangelical voters. Winning Iowa is key to his chances, and just trashing Trump isn't the way to get them.
In general, since there are many voters who like Trump but are still persuadable, it makes sense to bait Trump into saying deranged things and then punch back. That appears to be the strategy.
He's so far behind that he needs to go all in and run a full court press on Trump's record. DeSantis is the proverbial 15-seed taking on Duke who needs a gimmick and has no shot in a fundamental match-up
I actually said this to friends about Jeb in 2016. Insulting his wife should’ve been the last straw. Decking him on stage and saying screw it to the Presidency would’ve not only been doing right by his family but it would’ve exposed Trump for what he is - a lousy loudmouth - to everyone, including his fans.
I think you understand the Trump voter far less than you claim to.
Wanting an outsider doesn't make people stupid, it makes them smart.
I voted for Trump and I am neither the rube nor the idiot you suggest I am.
I I think DeSantis is the better choice. But only because the Democrats will cheat worse than the USSR used to and 10x worse than in 2020, if Trump is the GOP candidate. Democrats, the deep state, and the MSM, have demonstrated already that they have zero morals about election cheating.
Any mass voter base is going to have their share of idiots, Hanania is not wrong in his assessment of dumber Trump voters
Of course. But leftists are far more gullible. And no-Trumpers are truly idiots.
>But only because the Democrats will cheat worse than the USSR used to and 10x worse than in 2020, if Trump is the GOP candidate. Democrats, the deep state, and the MSM, have demonstrated already that they have zero morals about election cheating.
Just proving Hanania's point.
I'm with you, Optional. Richard's vision of Republicans as chimps laying around under a canopy evoked a gasp of shock followed by laughter (my typical response to stupidity and poop-throwing). HCL, while "any mass voter base is going to have their share of idiots", Hanania never speaks with any sort of recognition of the Democrat meerkats. Rather, he considers them intellectuals. Go figure.
Interesting proposal of a boxing match; it lines up with my opinion that the appeal of Trump has been an appreciation for a Rocky-esque figure's entrance into the political arena fighting on our behalf. I'm not even a fan of most sports, but like many Americans, I'm fed up with the affronts to our values and views by things like minimizing the alphabet indoctrination to flippant references to our reactions as "Dylan Mulvaney Hysteria." The word itself (hysteria) has a long historical pattern of being used to diminish and shut up people.
Personally, I'm confused by the yahoos in the Conservative camp who blindly follow Trump - and I know they're there. But if you're looking to label anyone with an political R behind their voting card a primate, you ought to at least have the honesty to include all the D's that would fill in their voting bubble with a vote for our current diminishing President, or our half-baked VP, as well.
They will do this against DeS as well...
"Would you rather live in rural West Virginia or Chicago's South Side"?
West Virginia all day long. Like Braer Rabbit and Briar Patch. Whatever you do, don't make me live in those beautiful mountains with those honest people. I couldn't take it.
There is a real disconnect between Republican intellectuals and the base, especially after the Trump-led populist surge Republicans have had. National Review is still full of never-Trumpers holding on to William F. Buckley's fusionist ideas. This is why that panel of 8 intellectuals you mentioned in the article only provided bad solutions. It's not the party of Romney anymore. Some newer publications like American Affairs and the think-tank American Compass are trying to change that and provide an intellectual sheen to the populist GOP, but those outlets are hardly read by the people they claim to stand for.
I can definitely see this hypothetical boxing match being a boon to DeSantis. But I am also saddened by the fact that this is what it will take for DeSantis to beat Trump.
DeSantis needs to say to Trump: "Listen to me you queer, stop calling me Meatball Ron or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."
AFAIK, DeSantis has never talked about the fact that he could be the first Italian American president. "Meatball Ron" can be seen as anti-Italian insult. Perhaps DeSantis could try and frame it as defending his Italian heritage against Trump's attacks.
Vidal deserved many a face punch...what a mean queen he was.
That's what I'm saying. Romney was the last candidate of the old GOP, the "we love corporations" GOP. The new GOP actively goes against corporations (e.g. Disney, Anheuser-Busch, Target).
Do they, though, apart from a few high-profile ones that act too woke? Seems like most of the time they just give them whatever they want.
The thing is that trump actually believes all the crazy things he says about how he’s in the best shape, he really won the ejection, etc- or at least the concept of something being true or not means nothing to him. Trying to outflank him in just blatant denial of reality is tough because most people have some remaining self awareness and end up backtracking or getting embarrassed when they try to steal from trumps playbook. Remember when Rubio tried to imply that trump has a tiny penis? He ended up basically apologizing for bringing the discourse down, mistakenly believing that voters value integrity. If he had really leaned into it and made penis size a key plank of his campaign he might have done better, but he just didn’t have the stomach for it. Desantis would face the same problem: he’s just not willing to divorce himself from reality enough to make up nonsense with the conviction he’d need to.
If DeSantis actually did this, it would be like an attention black hole consuming the internet. People make jokes about Trump being like a pro wrestler, but this would be a huge step towards WWE being real life.
Regardless of whether or not any of you like the things he says, Hanania is better at getting a reaction out of his own readers than anyone on substack.
You just never know what he's going to say. It's interesting as hell!
He really is. Sometimes I make offtopic comments just to boost the man's numbers!
"Those are exciting questions to conservative intellectuals but way too boring for the Republican masses. They will never tell a pollster this, but they resent anyone trying to make them think too hard, which is part of the reason they hate liberals in the first place."
Dying . . . thanks
Please stop trying to analyze Trump voters. Trump voters are looking for a fighter for a reason. Because people like you and the deep state need to be squashed. DeSantis does not have the appropriate level of rage to do so, he would forgive and accomodate you.
Was the 2020 election fair or is Trump Hitler? Pick one. If you leave a bank vault open over the weekend will the money still be there on Monday? What if there was no way to even check if the money is still there? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. IQ man, IQ. Think please.
DeSantis has the perfect level of rage. His is controlled and calculated. He isn't all words and bluster. Look at all his ACTIONS.
I like DeSantis. I actually like almost all the candidates, left and right, EXCEPT for Biden. I think this is the first time in my life that we have a full slate of actual good candidates.
This may be the most engrossing prose I’ve read since Hitchens. Bravo.
I hope this article makes its way to the DeSantis campaign. Not so Ron can literally fight Trump in the ring, but so his people understand the battleground.
Can I have the odds and the rules please;)
Best idea so far. He hasn't come up with a verbal way to challenge the alpha as such.
I don't think he can do it. He's just too awkward. I watched parts of the Florida governor debate with Christie and he just doesn't come across well. I love his policy, but I don't think he's going to be able to hold a candle to Trump