So, did the Democrats fall into Trump's trap?

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Lol, it seems like every time Trump makes an idiotic blunder, there's some hot take that he's actually playing 4 dimensional chess.  He isn't, he's just an idiot.

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Lol, it seems like every time Trump makes an idiotic blunder, there's some hot take that he's actually playing 4 dimensional chess.  He isn't, he's just an idiot.

Ok. Go watch Rachel Maddow fawn over Bill Clinton and the "triangulation" strategy. This is basically the same thing in principle. It's basic politics, 101.

It really isn't.  This has nothing in common with triangulation.

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Lol, it seems like every time Trump makes an idiotic blunder, there's some hot take that he's actually playing 4 dimensional chess.  He isn't, he's just an idiot.

Ok. Go watch Rachel Maddow fawn over Bill Clinton and the "triangulation" strategy. This is basically the same thing in principle. It's basic politics, 101.

It really isn't.  This has nothing in common with triangulation.

Not literally, no. It does involve the strategic use of words to intentionally make big news out of nothing

That's not triangulation and I'm kind of baffled at how you're making this link.  Triangulation involves adopting certain aspects of your opponents platform, in an attempt to outflank them.  

While you could make the argument that Trump is attempting to do this with his minimum wage comments (even if the attempt was completely botched by his simultaneously taking on 3 positions at once),  unless you think that Clinton was somehow advocating for Russia to hack her opponents, these two things have nothing more in common than any other two random events in politics.

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I made this point in another thread, but this comment is particularly dangerous for Trump precisely because you're completely wrong.  This isn't a stand alone comment, something random that won't be relevant in the future.  In fact, this feeds directly into a narrative that has been slowly building for weeks.

-Trump expresses admiration for Putin.
-Trump's only change to the GOP platform involves not disputing Russian claims in the Ukraine.
-The wikileaks email dump has suspicious ties to Russian intelligence, and has suspiciously convenient timing for the Trump campaign.
-Trump's comments about NATO.

Alone, you'd be right, all of these events would fade as the media moves on.  Unfortunately for Trump this isn't a standalone comment, this is the latest in a series of blunders that all build into each other and feed into this narrative.

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That link to triangulation is tenuous at best.  The Trump strategy and triangulation are fundamentally different, different implementation, different strategies, different goals.  You can't just say that they're basically the same thing because they involve the candidate saying something meaningless.  If that were the case, you could say essentially any two things in politics are the same thing.

The thing is, yes, if any of these stories were alone, you could explain them away and people would forget about it.  The problem is that when you have story after story corroborating the same thing, it doesn't matter if you have an explanation for each individual thing (good or half-baked), people are still going to start to think.

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The Republicans didn't nominate Pat Buchanan for President until 2016, see.

Yet they remained major portions of the base. It has been a boiling cauldron for years.

Lol, it seems like every time Trump makes an idiotic blunder, there's some hot take that he's actually playing 4 dimensional chess.  He isn't, he's just an idiot.

This.

For God's sake, he could win a 45 state landslide somehow and you'd still say he ran a terrible campaign. You can't even admit he's a worthy adversary when he's literally beating your candidate?

He is running a sh**tty campaign, seriously what has he done that you can even say is smart? He managed to piss off every group outside of non-college educated whites and he needs to make inroads with those groups to even have a chance.

And yet he is ahead?

Being a point ahead on RCP at the height of your convention bump ain't something to shout from the rooftops.

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He's also spending hardly anything on advertising, and Hillary is piling in millions for a tepid lead/tie at best. I don't think anyone could conclusively say either candidate is running a stellar campaign at this point.

That doesn't mean her paid media campaign was useless. She has a lot of vulnerabilities, isn't well-liked and has had an awful month. Something was going to give eventually, as paid media doesn't guarantee you a lead, even if your opponent is spending virtually nothing.

The other thing is that a ton of her spending is on organization, something which wouldn't pay off until election day.