Comment by terminalshort
11 hours ago
As were many hundreds of thousands of other men, and yet Trump is in the Oval office and they are not.
11 hours ago
As were many hundreds of thousands of other men, and yet Trump is in the Oval office and they are not.
An ageing Biden and Dubya have also occupied that office and they don't exactly strike me as "master persuader" types either.
Nobody is accusing Trump of lacking ambition or charisma, and there's also no doubt the party machine that backed him is pretty sophisticated in the arts of political campaigning. But there's a difference between being a "master persuader" able to convince almost anyone of almost anything and being a shameless braggart in front of an electorate that's unusually impressed by a celebrity's overconfidence and wealth, and also being a lot less shameless about appealing to their chauvinistic attitudes than predecessors.
So Joe Biden and George W Bush are also master persuaders?
I feel we've cheapened the title "master persuader" if every elected politician in semi-democratic nations, even the nepo babies, gets that accolade.
I'm really looking for masterful persuasion, preferably of people who haven't already poisoned themselves with a diet of misinformation.
Biden was a great campaigner and speech maker. Similar to Trump in that he wasn't afraid to piss people off. Don't let the dementia addled version that you saw in his 80s fool you into thinking he wasn't a man of extreme outlier political talent to get where he was. So was W Bush. You think going up on stage and acting like the smartest guy in the room (as many who worked with Bush say he actually was) is going to win you any votes? But acting like Bush will. That's not something just anyone can do. And you think calling 3 men out of 300 million "master persuaders" cheapens it? Any player in the NBA is a master basketball player and there are hundreds of them at any given time.