O’Malley goes Godwin's Law on Trump

[136or142]

*bump*

And now O'Malley calls Trump "unfit for office":

https://twitter.com/AlexWitt/status/919560641010073600

I think it's an interesting question: re: how far will the 2020 Dems go in saying that Trump is unsuited to the presidency.  Will they call him fascist, mentally unwell, etc.?  O'Malley is already going there, and as long as one of the candidates is willing to do it, the media will ask all the others if they agree.

Just because it's extreme doesn't make it untrue that Trump is unsuited to the Presidency or is mentally unwell (it's been debated elsewhere on this board whether Trump is a fascist and I argued that he's an 'aspirational fascist' or whatever term was used.)  

If you are denying these things, I don't think that makes it so.  I think you are suffering from 'normalcy bias.'

The normalcy bias, or normality bias, is a belief people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster and its possible effects, because it causes people to have a bias to believe that things will always function the way things normally function.

[136or142]

*bump*

And now O'Malley calls Trump "unfit for office":

https://twitter.com/AlexWitt/status/919560641010073600

I think it's an interesting question: re: how far will the 2020 Dems go in saying that Trump is unsuited to the presidency.  Will they call him fascist, mentally unwell, etc.?  O'Malley is already going there, and as long as one of the candidates is willing to do it, the media will ask all the others if they agree.

Just because it's extreme doesn't make it untrue that Trump is unsuited to the Presidency or is mentally unwell (it's been debated elsewhere on this board whether Trump is a fascist and I argued that he's an 'aspirational fascist' or whatever term was used.)  

If you are denying these things, I don't think that makes it so.  I think you are suffering from 'normalcy bias.'

No, I'm not denying it.  I'm just saying that it's unusual for presidential candidates to talk about the opposing party's president in such stark terms, and I'm legitimately curious as to how far the 2020 Dems will go with this.  For now, O'Malley's going farther than the others tend to.  I don't hear Elizabeth Warren using the "f-word" (fascist) to describe Trump, nor Kamala Harris talking about Trump's mental health.  If, tomorrow, you asked them those questions straight up, they'd probably skirt the issue, saying that Trump is ideologically extreme and that he has serious character problems and so forth, but they probably wouldn't put it in the terms that O'Malley does.

But I'm not sure that that's going to last forever.  Maybe two years from now, Dem. primary voters will be pushing the presidential candidates to condemn Trump in stronger terms than they have so far.

I don't know, Trump is an 'aspirational fascist' who is deranged and completely ignorant of public policy.  His supporters claimed they liked his 'telling it like it is' (which really meant nothing more than telling them what they wanted to here), so I'd like to hear Democratic candidates be completely truthful about Trump. 

I think Elizabeth Warren has said she isn't going to run for President and I don't know what Kamala Harris has said.  Hillary Clinton made a number of comments during the 2016 campaign that clearly hinted that she thought Donald Trump was mentally unbalanced, even though she didn't say outright 'he's deranged.'

[136or142]

I think Elizabeth Warren has said she isn't going to run for President

She hasn't.  She said she isn't running right now, but that's present tense, not future tense:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=233345.msg5772512#msg5772512

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She has pointedly refused to make any kind of promise that she's going to serve her full Senate term if she's reelected next year, and she's acting like a presidential candidate:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/us/politics/democrats-president-2020.html?mcubz=3
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/us/politics/bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-democrats-presidential-election.html

So nothing's certain at this early stage, but is she one of the 10 most likely people to end up joining the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination?  I'd say yes.

Oh, odd.  I thought she had made a comment that she thought she could be most effective as a United States Senator.