That might be the best way to make him do something. When he realizes that people think the fake video makes sense, he'll claim the video was real out of spite and start defending a reasonable position.
He used to be a Democrat - one of the excuses people had for voting for him was that he would really govern from the left. There are (probably authentic) photos of him palling around with the Clintons. He praised Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State.
I don't think you can deepfake Donald Trump. The man is a recursive deepfake of himself.
Trump never came around to accepting Covid had to be dealt with (doing so would have easily given him a second term), and is just barely starting to condemn Putler. This idea that Trump masterfully chooses his positions based on popular effectiveness is highly overrated.
With him, everything was a calculation. Admitting COVID was a serious issue was thought to bring an end to the stock market boom, which was the big economic win for his re-election campaign. The market crashed anyway, before recovering ahead of the election.
In any case, 2020 might be the first time enough voters realized that a bull run on Wall St doesn't move the needle much for their own economic well-being.
I don't see how this narrative makes sense, and seems to be yet another example of "4d chess". The market promptly dropped ~30% in March 2020 in response to Covid, but was then inflated with trillions of dollars of newly printed stimulus money. Which, as an aside, has finally filtered into the consumer economy causing much of the price inflation we've been suffering.
Realizing Covid wasn't going to go away and coming around to addressing Covid in June 2020 or so wouldn't have affected the market, which had already priced in Covid. But it would have made Trump an actual crisis-time leader with the corresponding popularity boost just from leading people through a difficult time - publicly validating the hardships everyone is feeling goes a long way. But instead, he dug his heels in opposition to how things were developing.
If anything, I think saying that Trump is a basic contrarian is a better predictor of his positions. The problem is that while our society has major flaws that make contrarian viewpoints compelling, contrarianism on its own does not produce useful reforms.
> But instead, he dug his heels in opposition to how things were developing
Mostly in blue states! back then, red states where doing fine, but Seattle & New York were the first major epicenters. It was a deliberate political calculus to cast Democratic-led regions as inept. Florida "banned" New Yorkers for a bit. Minimizong COVID also made businesses happy, so it appeared to be a 3-fer for Republicans, until it boomeranged.
Still, acknowledging Covid as a real problem would have let him drive the density difference even more. It's harder to blame democratic leaders as inept if you are downplaying the seriousness of the underlying problem. Also by June 2020 it was quite apparent that the problem was not going to be isolated to nursing homes etc, even if the absolute numbers weren't bad everywhere.
> In any case, 2020 might be the first time enough voters realized that a bull run on Wall St doesn't move the needle much for their own economic well-being.
Wall Street was on a bull run leading into 2016 too, and that realization was one of Trump's arguments at the time. Once he won, he dropped that line, but if 2020 was such a time, I'd count 2016 too
