• ctrl_alt_esc@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    If charisma wins elections how did Trump win?

    Edit: forgot that he most likely didn’t, at least the second time. Still, how did his potatoe charisma get him the first win?

    • Zak@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Have you seen the man work a crowd?

      His antics don’t work on you, or on me, or likely on most people you or I would be friends with. They clearly work on a huge swath of the population though, or we wouldn’t be where we are today.

      • ctrl_alt_esc@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        Work a crowd, as in talking barely comprehensible gibberish and hurling insults at people? So charismatic…

        • EldritchFemininity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          2 days ago

          2016 Trump ran on the idea of being the good businessman who was going to clean up the swamp and get this company’s country’s act together. Just like any other CEO selling to investors. I have friends who, halfway into his campaign, were like, “I kinda like this Trump guy, he tells it like it is,” and by the time of the election they had completely 180’d on him because of the details of what he was promising.

          One of these friends is super into cults and true crime, and he says that listening to Trump is eerie because he sounds exactly like Jim Jones. Then, and now. Back then he sounded like Jim Jones in his prime (and read Hitler’s speeches as bedtime stories according to an ex-wife, which would explain why all his campaign promises match up with Hitler’s). Today, he sounds like Jim Jones making his death speeches while you can hear them forcing the cultists to drink the Flavor-Aid and gasping, choking, and dying in the background of the recordings.

          The people who liked Trump the first time and didn’t change their minds then were never going to change their minds the second time. They’ve already bought into the cult. And that’s what Trump is - a cult leader. He promises them a solution to their misery by giving them an obvious target to take their aggression out on, and people eat it up because they want a simple solution that absolves them of any blame.

          • ctrl_alt_esc@lemmy.ml
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            19 hours ago

            ran on the idea of being a good businessman

            How could anyone buy that, given his well known complete failure as a businessman? Only a stupid person would.

            Anyway, it’s besides the point of our main discussion. I don’t know who Jim Jones is, and you’re right about Trump’s populism and MAGA being a cult, that still doesn’t make him charismatic though.

            • EldritchFemininity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              18 hours ago

              Jim Jones, of the Jonestown Massacre. The cult leader who we got the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” from (though they actually were too poor to get Kool-Aid and they laced Flavor-Aid, the off brand version, with cyanide instead). When he started out, he was actually a very influential Civil Rights activist who is responsible for the policies that would later become the foundation of the civil rights laws in his home city. But he later became a crazy cult leader and by the time of the cult’s mass suicide, he ranted like Trump does today.

              As for how anybody could believe that Trump’s a good businessman, many people only know him as that guy from The Apprentice, not the businessman who has bankrupted multiple casinos, an airline company (and beauty pageant for young girls who he flew around the country with in his private plane - just him, the girls, and a man by the name of Epstein), and who couldn’t even sell steaks to Americans.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      trump back in 2016 was genuinely charismatic… to his base. He was able to quickly spin nonsense schoolyard bully insults against anyone who went up against him (“Little marco rubio” and so forth). Combine that with Hilary having almost two decades of smear campaign tactics against her at that point and not committing one way or another towards decorum or “you fuckers are weird” and… yeah.

      trump in 2024 won because the left blames Biden for the economy and the chuds wanted their hitler back.