Donald Trump’s debate performance was far worse than even his inner circle anticipated.
While Donald Trump’s team is publicly pushing a postdebate victory lap, many in his camp were privately disappointed in the Republican candidate’s performance on Tuesday.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported Wednesday night that several Trump insiders were “stunned” by his poor performance and by just how easily he fell for all of Kamala Harris’s attempts to provoke him.
“I’m told that as soon as Donald Trump exited that debate stage, he immediately began quizzing those waiting in his viewing room about how the last 90 minutes had gone,” said Collins. “While several people praised him to his face, telling him they did a great job, that’s not what a lot of them are saying privately today.
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Apparently, all that practice with members of his team, such as former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, had ultimately amounted to very little when it came time to debate.
Considering his rapidly deteriorating mental faculties and the fact that’s he’s surrounded himself with yesmen; he probably really believes that he did well in that debate.
I’m sure he doesn’t even care that people are mocking him about it, the fact that everybody is talking about “concepts of a plan” and “they’re eating the cats” is still a victory in his mind. Good attention or bad attention doesn’t matter, attention for the sake of attention is the only thing he cares about. Nobody is really talking about anything specific Harris said or did, she didn’t really have any really breakout moments that I can recall after having watched it, it was just Trump being a jackass and saying dumb shit.
A person like this does not have inner reflection the way you’re imagining. I vouchsafe this fact to you: he sought external validation immediately, real and imagined, and then moved on to the next pissing contest without ever thinking genuinely about his choices leading up to that display
I’m not entirely sure he doesn’t stew on this.
Hitler, famously, obsessed over negative news coverage/press about him. Even to the point where he threatened violence/war with New York if they didn’t redact a column about him being a wannabe dictator.
Trump is the same kind of narcissist Hitler was, and gets similarly obsessed with negative press about him.
I agree that I doubt he’s reflecting on this, but he’s absolutely aware the rest of the world thinks he screwed up and that’s why he thinks they’re lying. Because everyone else around him says he won, so how could, literally every news agency, including Fox Entertainment “news”, say Kamala beat him?
But he is absolutely pissed and stewing in his own piss right now at all the negative coverage after his debate performance.
There is one exception to the “Trump hates negative press” that I’d like to note. When Dr. Fauci was called to meet with Trump after he corrected him on live TV about drinking bleach, he found Trump in his office saying “My god these ratings are amazing, they’re better than cable”. Oddly enough sometimes Trump sees any news is good news so long as he’s the main focus.
The times I’ve seen him really go off is when the news cycle stops paying attention to him.
Yep.
Isn’t it crazy how common it now is to understand and converse with people about the specifics of an otherwise rare personality disorder?
TIL
Oh yeah. That was a very nice choice of words.
A cromulent lexical affixation.
Spot on. I’ve read 10,000 comments regarding Trump that miss the most basic aspect of the man: Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Everything he says or does flows from this.
I don’t mean narcissist in the way most people sling the word around, I mean the actual mental illness. People slap that title on anyone selfish, lying or bullying. No, words have meaning.
No he doesn’t have any sort of internal reflection. My mother suffered NPD, I can tell you all about it. She didn’t have the mental space to consider, “Am I wrong?”. Such thoughts were literally impossible, her brain could not work that way. In the 50-years I knew that woman I never heard her admit fault or apologize. Not once. That’s pretty stunning if you think on it a few. And Trump makes mom look positively of sound mind!
Nothing the man says or does surprises me, yet people continue to be appalled. We keep trying view his thought processes through the lens of our own. Nah. That dog don’t hunt.
Nmom kid here too, you’re spot on. It’s actually fascinating if you forget the horrors. Like for example no empathy, and not like very very very low (hi dad!) empathy, but totally devoid of it. Just ‘cannot compute’ level.
Hope you’re doing fine btw!
I agree. Nmom kid here. I thought she didn’t have a concept of “truth”. To her, every statement was equally valid as long as it was useful to her. Just complete and total lack of a consistent worldview.