The fact that Tim Walz is an admitted blue falcon stolen valor scumbag is not a gratuitous tangent nor some bespoke, boutique line of attack that we need to move on from ASAP. No, it’s important and we need to keep it up. We need to keep all of it up, all the attacks, even the ones that we are supposed to be better than. Why? Because persuasion isn’t just about policy. This isn’t a forensics club where we compare facts and figures. If it were, we would’ve won long ago. Our enemies are not running a debating society election, and we shouldn’t be either. This is about persuasion. And persuasion is not some nerd at a whiteboard educating informed citizens. It’s war. Oh, facts and policy are part of it, but persuasion is, at its core, about emotion. We need to frow up, accept that reality and act on it.
I do persuasion for a living, standing up in front of juries and asking them to either give my client money or not take my client’s money. A trial is a venue similar to an election because you are seeking to convince random citizens who tend to be pretty earnest about the process. They take jury duty seriously, believing it is their civic duty. And many voters do, too, except you sadly can’t voir dire the electorate and dismiss the complete idiots. But enough about the Democrat base.
The reality is that both jurors and voters choose the side they feel should win. It’s not so simple as who they like better, though that’s helpful. They will give you the result they feel best about. Jurors and voters both want to feel that they’ve done the right thing.
What we want to do here is make them feel that by voting for Trump, they have done the right thing.
There are two ways to persuade. You can either persuade people to support something or to oppose something. We patriotic Republicans are trying to persuade citizens not to vote for the damn communist Democrats. This is a negative campaign. We are mostly trying to get them to vote against Harris; attempting to convince people to vote for Trump is really a supporting effort.
Why? The electorate is largely baked in. We’ve already got all the people who are going to like Donald Trump. Those people are ready to crawl over a San Francisco sidewalk to vote for him in November. And there are a bunch of people who are going to crawl over broken Chardonnay glasses and their cats’ litter boxes to vote for that skanky Dem half-wit and her duty-dodging tampon aficionado partner. We have to focus on the persuadables. We have to convince them to vote for Donald Trump or against Kamala Harris.
It will mostly mean convincing people to vote against her. The fact is that Donald Trump has been in the public eye as a politician for about a decade now. Everyone has an opinion about Trump already. Yeah, there is some room to move because he was pretty damn good overall, and that people want to return to prosperity, security, and freedom, but if you don’t have a positive view of Donald Trump by now, you’re probably not going to ever have a positive view of Donald Trump. What we need to do is be able to persuade you to accept him because you don’t like the alternative. So, our key persuasion objective is making people not like Kamala Harris, and she is eminently not likable, so we’ve got that going for us. Which is nice.
Our main persuasion effort has to be to convince people that Scat Francisco party gal Kamala Harris and her war zero running mate Chubbie Murphy are terrible people in who will ruin the country if we elect them. Now, our task is simplified by the fact that this is true. They are both communist scumbags who hate Jews and Christians, fetishize bizarre gender weirdos, want to kill babies, and think the only proper use of “assault weapons” is by government thugs to intimidate patriots.
We have to persuade people to want to vote against these mutants. Bowtie Republicans think we should do it by talking only about policy. We can explain how the Dem idiots’ border policy is pretty much sucking the entire Third World into the United States and how pretty soon we’re going to look like Europe, which itself looks a lot like Mogadishu. Minneapolis is already there. That’s powerful imagery. Other powerful imagery comes from Kamala’s and Dodgy McThereIWas’s home cities. I can imagine an ad with footage of the Boschian tableau of junkies, hobos, and perverts that is The-City-By-The-Bay beneath the superimposed mug of that cackling cretin while the old Scott McKenzie chestnut “(If You’re Going To) San Francisco” plays.
Other policy topics include crime in the street as well as perverts in our schools and our girls’ locker rooms. Gas is $1 million a gallon. If I drank milk, I’d probably know how much it is, but I’ve heard rumors it’s a lot. Kamala wants to embargo arms to Israel and send pallets of cash to Iran. The Chinese are looking at Taiwan like a thirsty Walz eyes a sexy stallion – got your back, JD; your new rules, Timmy!
The bottom line is that there are a lot of great policy issues to hit these two morons on, but policy alone is not enough. Policy alone doesn’t persuade. Policy is just one component in a total effort to paint a picture of Kamala/Walz as the incompetent danger to America that they are.
That total effort includes hitting her for hiding even from her own regime media. What is she afraid of? Drowning in a journalist tongue bath? There’s also the inauthenticity meme that Trump raised by pointing out that Kamala Harris can’t decide whether she’s an Indian or black or whatever. And yes, there is Tim Walz’s disgraceful stolen valor, something particularly effective with the millions of battleground state vets who actually showed up at real battlegrounds. What’s particularly great about slamming AWOL Walz is how Kamala Harris has no idea how dangerous this is to her campaign because she doesn’t actually know any vets and only listens to MSNBCNN. We’ll just let it be a surprise.
A whole bunch of other things can contribute to painting a picture of this dynamic duo of failure. We should exploit them all. We are trying to make people who don’t know them very well dislike them so they vote for Trump or don’t vote at all. This is a negative campaign. It must encompass everything negative about the targets, not just the things that don’t make our fussier friends on the right uncomfortable.
The good news is that we’re lucky enough to have perhaps the best political marketer since Ronald Reagan as our standard bearer. Trump has a natural understanding of what persuades people, at least what persuades normal people as opposed to people inside the Beltway. There’s no one better at it, and if he wants to hit a political opponent on something, you might want to think twice before you announce that it’s a terrible idea and that he should be discussing marginal tax rate policy.
Sure, Trump can still go off on personal tangents like that ridiculous segue bashing Brian Kemp. I and many others, including the bowtie conservatives, thought this feuding was self-indulgent and counterproductive. But look at the big picture. When was the last exhausting own goal we saw from Trump? We saw them every day in 2016 and 2020 when he still had Twitter. That’s all we were talking about. But this time, we haven’t had one of these unnecessary imbroglios in a while. Now, soon he’s going to do an interview with Elon Musk, and he may announce he’s coming back to Twitter, which I think would be pulling on a pair of Bad Idea Jeans. When Trump is talking about his pet peeves in public rather than in the mega ghetto of Truth Social, he is not laser-focused on persuading persuadables about the perniciousness of the pinko progressive pair.
This is all about persuasion. We need to do it. But persuasion can be rough. This fight is not for the weak or faint of heart. The regime media is doing everything it can to make sure the undecideds’ impression of Kamala Harris is that she’s brat. What we need do is make sure the undecideds’ impression of Kamala Harris is that she’s bad.