I don’t think your point and mine contradict each other.
I likely should’ve clarified it a bit more, but I specified the long game because that, IMO, is the significant bit.
Trump is absolutely a master manipulator, and it’s absolutely the case that the Dems have underestimated him, to their detriment.
But I think it’s far more likely that that ability is more in the nature of a natural talent honed over a lifetime. He notoriously has a startlingly short attention span and a complete lack of interest in anything other than whatever concerns him at the moment.
So, for instance, I think that he’s distancing himself from Project 2025 simply because he recognized that they were making him look bad, and that at most he assured himself that if/when it came to it, after he’d managed to finagle the win on which he’s laser-focused, he could revisit the idea of following their roadmap. Then he stopped thinking about it entirely.
Again, that’s why I stipulated the long game. I just don’t think that’s the way his mind works. To the contrary, he appears to be entirely in the moment, feeding whoever he’s talking to whatever they need to hear so that he can get whatever it is that he wants from them, right then and there.
On a bit of a side note, I actually worked with a guy much like the Trump the Motley Fool article describes, and it was uncanny. I could stand there listening to him, knowing full well in some corner of my mind that he was almost certainly lying, and still find myself, as if I was hypnotized, nodding and agreeing with everything he said. And I wasn’t the only one - most notably, he was fired and rehired at least four times of which I was aware, and the owner once confided in me that every time he fired him, he swore that was it, then every time he came back, he’d just find himself rehiring him again, as if he couldn’t even control his own actions.
To this day, I have no idea how he did it, but it undeniably worked.
I don’t think your point and mine contradict each other.
I likely should’ve clarified it a bit more, but I specified the long game because that, IMO, is the significant bit.
Trump is absolutely a master manipulator, and it’s absolutely the case that the Dems have underestimated him, to their detriment.
But I think it’s far more likely that that ability is more in the nature of a natural talent honed over a lifetime. He notoriously has a startlingly short attention span and a complete lack of interest in anything other than whatever concerns him at the moment.
So, for instance, I think that he’s distancing himself from Project 2025 simply because he recognized that they were making him look bad, and that at most he assured himself that if/when it came to it, after he’d managed to finagle the win on which he’s laser-focused, he could revisit the idea of following their roadmap. Then he stopped thinking about it entirely.
Again, that’s why I stipulated the long game. I just don’t think that’s the way his mind works. To the contrary, he appears to be entirely in the moment, feeding whoever he’s talking to whatever they need to hear so that he can get whatever it is that he wants from them, right then and there.
On a bit of a side note, I actually worked with a guy much like the Trump the Motley Fool article describes, and it was uncanny. I could stand there listening to him, knowing full well in some corner of my mind that he was almost certainly lying, and still find myself, as if I was hypnotized, nodding and agreeing with everything he said. And I wasn’t the only one - most notably, he was fired and rehired at least four times of which I was aware, and the owner once confided in me that every time he fired him, he swore that was it, then every time he came back, he’d just find himself rehiring him again, as if he couldn’t even control his own actions.
To this day, I have no idea how he did it, but it undeniably worked.