Trump More Hated, Mocked, Loathed And Loathsome Than Ever. Does It Matter?
Yes! But let's contextualize that!
You’ll often hear commentators talk about how Donald Trump may be shitty and loathed and ugly and stinky and dementia-tastic, BUT the American people elected him to do a limited number of specific things: groceries and immigration. For whatever reason, they’ll say, the American people gave Trump a mandate to fix those things on Day One. (He never had a mandate, it was a little squeaker of an election, if like five more people had shown up, Kamala Harris would be president and life for millions of people would be better.)
There’s also been a lot of talk lately about Trump’s horrible poll numbers, which he believes are fake. They are bad, bad, bad, and getting worse. Last time we talked about it, we talked about how Trump seems to be, remarkably, losing the floor underneath him, which has historically been around 40 percent. No matter what he did, he could recreate Epstein Island in the middle of Fifth Avenue, 40 mouthbreathing percent of Americans would stick with him. There have been signs that maybe that 40 percent number is getting mighty shaky.
Now there are more signs.
A new AP/NORC poll shows that Trump is specifically less popular than ever on the economy and immigration, i.e. the things he was allegedly supposed to be good at, not that any intelligent person ever actually believed he would be good at those things. The headline we see in it is the number of percentages that start with a “3,” including his overall approval rating, which is down to … hoo boy … 36 percent.
Let’s do some bullet points:
Trump’s approval rating on the economy — AKA “affordability” AKA “groceries” AKA HOAX! — is just 31 percent. AP/NORC notes that’s his lowest number ever, and that it’s tanked down from 40 back in March. Disapproval? That’d be 67. That’s right, Donald Trump is 36 points underwater on “economy.”
He’s slipping among Republicans on economy, going from 78 percent approval all the way down to 69.
Only 31 percent of Americans overall think the economy is good. That includes only 56 percent of Republicans. Meanwhile, 44 percent of Republicans say it’s shit.
TUFF ON CRIME? Only according to 43 percent of Americans.
Immigration? Only 38 percent of Americans — again, under 40 — approve of Trump’s Hitler Gestapo ethnic cleansing campaign to terrorize and deport and eliminate minorities. That has again taken a nosedive from the same poll in March, when he was at 49.
AP/NORC says the “good news” for Trump is that his overall approval hasn’t tanked so far. It is, again, at 36 percent. But it was only at 42 before! He was already eating urinal cakes off a dead raccoon’s asshole in hell when it came to his overall approval rating!
Again, that was the “good news.”
His disapproval rating is 61 percent.
So he’s really nailing it, we think.
Now all of this is great for America, it shows the country hasn’t fully lost its mind yet.
But we do want to flag a teensy thing that Jonathan V. Last wrote about at the Bulwark this week, something that’s important for contextualizing where we are in this moment. It’s often said that with a lot of the things Trump and members of his traitor regime do, they act as if they will never have to be accountable to anyone, as if the rule of law will never be restored, will never come for them, as if there will never be American Nuremberg trials and they won’t be 10 times as harsh as the original Nuremberg trials.
They seem certain of it. And it might be just the ignorant hubris of the greatest examples living or dead of the Dunning-Kruger Syndrome.
It’s also possible that right now the regime is, as Last suggests, at least trying to execute what’s known as the authoritarian shift, the thing where they literally stop pretending to be accountable to the voters, or that they even have to pay lip service to that.
As Last frames it, “Is Trump getting weaker, or is the authoritarian danger increasing? Yes.” He notes that it took Viktor Orbán a really long time to execute this shift, whereas Hitler did it in just a few weeks. (It may be that Trump and his MAGA Nazis have been trying to go too fast relative to their competence, which might be part of his undoing.) He notes the media and corporate capitulation to Trump, his development of ICE as an unaccountable Gestapo, and other ways Trump is currently molding the US into an authoritarian system, a patrimonial state with himself as the only law that matters. It’s already pretty clear that members of the military, and Secretary Shitfaced who runs it, are committing war crimes or just murder for Trump.
So it’s a mixed bag.
Not to piss on everybody’s Corn Flakes, just putting things in perspective. Trump will get less and less popular, but Orbán and Putin are loathed by their people. They just don’t have the ability at the moment to do anything about it, because the state isn’t accountable to the people anymore. (Though there are big elections coming in Hungary that might reveal that Orbán’s power is not absolute.)
Preventing that shift is the single most important thing on the American people’s plate right now. The fact that Donald Trump is the most hated, loathed, jeered-at and loathsome human alive on Planet Earth, well, that can be a powerful tool in that fight.
OPEN THREAD.
[AP/NORC]
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Wow. Indiana Republicans told Trump to shove his threats up his ass. Gerrymandering bill fails 31-19.
𝐼𝑡’𝑠 𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑜 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑟𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑔𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑖𝑠, 𝑎𝑠 𝐿𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝑠𝑢𝑔𝑔𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑠, 𝑎𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝑡𝑟𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 𝑒𝑥𝑒𝑐𝑢𝑡𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡’𝑠 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝑎𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑎𝑢𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑓𝑡, 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑝 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 𝑎𝑐𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑣𝑜𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠, 𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑛 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑝𝑎𝑦 𝑙𝑖𝑝 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑖𝑐𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡.
Marie Antoinette and Czar Nicholas have entered the chat.