Subject: Re: Puffery and Lies
Albaby1 is wrong here; it doesn’t matter that people won’t delve into it. Tie it to Trump. Prove that it calls for the end of Medicare, Social Security, and Reproductive Freedom. Bring up one or two other horribles, and tie it AGAIN to Trump, and then tie it AGAIN to Trump.

The problem with that is that it won't work. You can't "tie it to Trump" any more than you can rehabilitate Biden's image from the debate.

The Willie Horton attack ad worked because people didn't know much about Michael Dukakis and because it was Dukakis who did the thing. So Bush was able to define him with the Willie Horton ad as soft on crime.

Project 2025 can't work that way. Voters know Trump. There probably hasn't been a politician in modern history that is more well-defined in voter opinions that Trump. There's no open canvas for a negative ad campaign to write on. His image is fixed, for good or bad.

And part of that image is that he's a malignant narcissist with no regard whatsoever for the mainstream institutions of the GOP. Which makes it a waste of time to try to argue that he'll follow Project 2025 instead of his own selfish whims. A core part of his political identity is that he doesn't give a flying F about conservative think tanks or what they think.

These strategies work when you're trying to disrupt some random Congressional candidate who doesn't have a fixed brand identity and is trying to position them as a centrist. Instead of attacking them on their stated positions, you tie them to someone else on their team that's more extreme, so you can hit the more extreme positions instead of there's. So Democrats use the Koch Brothers or Michelle Bachman or Trump himself in their ads against against Republicans, while the GOP ties Democrats to AOC or Nancy Pelosi. The argument is that the candidate is in service to someone else's agenda, and you need to vote against that someone else's agenda.

But you can't do that to Trump. It doesn't work against the person who is the top dog, the person setting the agenda rather than following it. And Trump's central political identity is that he's utterly narcissistic, completely uninterested in what would benefit anyone other than himself. He is the least Party Man politician that has ever existed. If you tried to convince voters to reject Trump because he's just going to implement the Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell agenda, or Rick Scott's 12 Points to Rescue America...the voters would just laugh at you. You can do that with downballot candidates, but not the "I don't care about anyone but me" Trumpster.