(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Batteries vs Sharks? DJT is srsly messed up. MAGA doesn't care; Here's why. 6-19-2024 The Village [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-06-19 I was told once, by a kind person, that there are no stupid questions. That person was wrong. Kind, but wrong. Between sharks and shocks: Answering Trump’s unanswered question ...According to Trump’s telling, the [SC boat] manufacturer was being asked to make only electric boats but that such boats 1) were too heavy to float, 2) had to be slowly driven out to sea, which took hours and 3) then had so little charge left that you could only be out for 10 minutes. The first point is obviously false, given that there are lots of floating electric vessels — including in the U.S. Navy — so there’s no reason to assume that the rest would be true, either... “So I said, ‘Let me ask you a question,’” Trump explained. “And he said, ‘Nobody ever asks this question,’ and it must because of MIT, my relationship to MIT. Very smart.” www.washingtonpost.com/... 1) Asking a question that no one else has asked out loud before, may mean you are an imbecile. Or a genius. Or crazy. Or you just like to talk a lot for no apparent reason at all and happen to be near a microphone. 2) I have absolutely no relationship to a PhD just because my brother earned one. Short version of Trump’s question- Is it better to fight to the death with a hypothetical shark or risk electrocution by a boat sinking due to a hypothetical electric battery dropping into the ocean? “Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking?” Trump says he asked the man. “Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?” The boat manufacturer, he said, didn't know the answer. But lots of other people do: The risk of electrocution is extremely low, so stay on the boat. www.washingtonpost.com/... That article notes that that Trump assumes he would be electrocuted if he was near to the battery after he jumped in the water, but he assumes wrongly, and is now closer to the shark as he frantically bobs in the water. MIT, my ass. I would watch this movie during Shark Week Trump Rants About Sharks, and Everyone Just Pretends It’s Normal Par for the course. Trump is Trump. But imagine the response if Joe Biden had said it. Coming from Biden, that exact statement might have prompted calls from across the political spectrum for him to drop out of the race. From Trump, it was a blip that barely registered. I’ve previously called this dynamic “the banality of crazy”: Trump’s ludicrous statements are ignored precisely because they’re so routine—and routine occurrences don’t drive the news. They are the proverbial “dog bites man” stories that get ignored by the press. Except that even this truism breaks down when it comes to the asymmetry between coverage of Trump and Biden: Based on Google News tallies, the news story about Biden’s dog biting a Secret Service agent spurred far more press coverage than Trump saying that he would order shoplifters to be shot without a trial if he became president. www.theatlantic.com/... Donald Trump and Joe Biden are basically the same age. If they were teenagers, they could be in high school together. Joe would be the cool graduating senior with a bright future. Donald would be the mean freshman trying to figure out where the bathrooms are. Is Donald Trump okay? It is irresponsible to obsess over President Biden’s tendency to mangle a couple of words in a speech while Donald Trump is out there sounding detached from reality. Biden, who is old, at least makes sense. Trump, who also is old, rants like someone you’d cross the street to avoid. We in the media have failed by becoming inured to Trump’s verbal incontinence — not just the rapid-fire lies and revenge-seeking threats, but also the frightening glimpses into a mind that is, evidently, unwell. In 2016, Trump said outrageous things at his campaign rallies to be entertaining. In 2024, his tangents raise serious questions about his mental fitness… The White House press corps would be in wolf pack mode if Biden were in the middle of a speech and suddenly veered into gibberish about boats and sharks…The tendency with Trump, at 77, is to say he’s “just being Trump.” But he’s like this all the time. www.washingtonpost.com/... The truth about truth-- Dems care about our leaders telling the truth and making sense. Many Indys care about that as well. Some moderate Republicans (or former ones) are starting to care, too. But hardcore MAGAs never will. Donald Trump Jumps the Shark The former president’s rants are more incoherent than ever. But he doesn’t need to make sense to keep his followers in the tank. ...A mediasphere that notoriously trained its unfiltered cameras on Trump rallies and other verbal performances in 2016, to the tune of some $2 billion worth of free media for the candidate’s campaign, continues its autopilot coverage of Trump’s delusional outbursts as symptoms of a national mood of protest and resentful score-settling. Meanwhile, Biden’s gaffes from the stump are axiomatically the worrying digressions of a disoriented old natterer in a bubble of denial… [But] Trump’s verbal performance has long failed to matter to his mass following. What Trump says is far less consequential than how he says it: His Mad Libs vitriol aimed at a rotating cast of targets—the press, the invading immigrant hordes, the communist-led deep state, the rigged and tyrannical legal system—furnishes his following with a plug-and-play martyrology. This is by now a well-honed political transaction: Trump’s petulant tantrums dramatize his admirers’ utmost sense of persecution—and they do the same for him… Against this backdrop, it does little good to scour Trump’s gnomic utterances for “gotcha” signs of cognitive decline. It’s never mattered to the MAGAverse that their candidate makes little sense on the stump; what’s much more telling is that he’s out there on the frontiers of their own collective dreamscape, fighting off the malevolent forces that charge all the world’s sharks and batteries with primal demonic power. www.thenation.com/... Stormy said Trump always had a fear of sharks, even back when she first met him. Or was that fear merely foreshadowing the scary metaphor below? 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