Trumpty is processing his angst on social media again. His psychologist niece says that that’s what he does, he uses social media to process fears and feelings. So what has his lordship stirred up this Saturday in Spring? Last we knew he was in Rome making a spectacle of himself at the Pope’s funeral, so presumably he’s aboard Air Force One and catching up on the news. Maybe his latest plunging polls are distressing him. They certainly would distress anybody with two brain cells working. Here is Trump’s reply to whatever stimulus has him raging with his thumbs right now.
“It is not possible to have trials for millons and millions of people.” So, I guess we just let Trump grab millions and millions of people off the streets and send them where he will and that clunky old concept, what was it now? Oh yeah, due process, hey, there’s just no room for that kind of an anachronism in the modern Trump world.
We just need to cut to the chase and fill the prisons with people Trump decides are “criminals” because he “knows who the criminals are.” Psychic phenomena over the rule of law. Wonderful. Simply wonderful. If he’s this crazy in the first 100 days, what will his bottom look like, anybody want to speculate? And what ticked him off and got him all revved up like the Energizer Bunny? My personal take on that is that he saw his most recent polls, described here in Charlie Sykes’ newsletter.
Trump’s numbers are gruesome, and they get worse the closer you look. Consider some of these numbers from the new NYT/Siena poll: Trump is underwater on all of these issues:
Immigration: -4
Managing the federal gov’t: -8
Trade: -11
Economy: -12
Foreign conflicts: -14
War in Ukraine: -21
The Kilmar Abrego Garcia case: -21
You’ll recall that many of the smart kids told us that it was a mistake to focus on the rendition of the Maryland man to a gulag in El Salvador because immigration was Trump’s strong suit. But, as Aaron Blake notes, “The new NYT/Siena poll shows Kilmar Abrego Garcia is tied for Trump’s worst issue.” The crosstabs show that independents disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Abrego Garcia case by a whopping margin of 59-23.
So, the cruelty, lawlessness, and slouch toward autocracy do, in fact, matter, after all. Who knew?
The NYT poll has Trump’s approval rating at an historically low 42 percent. But the details are revealing:
- 66% of voters describe Trump’s second term as “chaotic”
- 59% describe it as “scary”
- 76% rate the economy as fair or poor
- 47% think the economy is worse than it was last year
- 50% say Trump made the economy worse, only 21% say he has made it better
- 44% say Trump’s policies have hurt them personally
- 55% oppose Trump’s tariffs
- “Taken together, the survey’s findings show that any second-term honeymoon for Mr. Trump is over. His approval rating among crucial independent voters is now at a woeful 29 percent.”
That poll is not an outlier. Consider…
- “With President Donald Trump’s second term approaching its 100-day mark, 40% of Americans approve of how he’s handling the job – a decline of 7 percentage points from February.”
- 59% of Americans disapprove of the administration’s tariff increases, while 39% approve.
- 55% disapprove of the cuts the administration is making to federal departments and agencies, while 44% approve.
- “A majority of Americans, 53 percent, disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, with 46 percent approving, a reversal from February when half of the public voiced approval of his approach. Negative views have ticked up across partisan groups over the past two months, with 90 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of independents and 11 percent of Republicans now disapproving of the way the president has managed one of his core policy issues.”
- “Seven in 10 Americans think President Donald Trump’s tariffs on international trade will drive up U.S. inflation, outweighing hopes that they’ll boost manufacturing employment and fueling a 64% disapproval rate of how he’s handling the issue.
Even nearly half of Republicans — 47% in the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Friday — said they think tariffs will negatively impact inflation. That jumps to 75% among independents, a swing group in national politics.”
- “Just 37% of respondents to the six-day poll that concluded on Monday approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, down from 42% in the hours after his January 20 inauguration, when he promised to supercharge the economy and bring about a “Golden Age of America.”
Harvard Kennedy School survey of young adults:
- “61% disapprove of Trump and 31% approve, while 42% think Trump will hurt their personal finances and 20% believe he’ll help, 9% said he’ll have no impact and 26% said they don’t know.
There is no good news in any of these statistics. So I think that Trump grabbed his phone and began inputting hysterical accusations as fast as he could hit the keys because he wants to reverse this trend. His idea of a reversal is to coerce the courts into going along with him to obliterate the rule of law — or he’ll attempt to obliterate the courts.
This is Trump 2.0 in a nutshell. He’s an authoritarian and he’s going to turn America into a dictatorship. However, and this has always been his Achilles’ heel although he chooses to ignore it, he only won the election by a plurality and a narrow one at that. He has no mandate except in his mind. All of his policies are rabidly opposed. And his efforts to get them to become accepted by even more extreme behavior is not working.
This is a time for conciliatory measures. Trump doesn’t see that. Or, if he does see it, he sees it in small pieces, like “Stop talking about firing Jerome Powell.” He can comprehend something simple like that. But overhauling his basic gameplan he can’t and won’t do. The only question now is how low do the polls go before Trump realizes that he basically has nobody on his side? And don’t forget, even his pals at Fox News are touting how low his polls are.
Yep, and all the ones he gives pardons to are not criminals, righhhht!
“40% of Americans approve of how he’s handling the job ”
WTF is wrong with these people?
40%?
How can there be so many morons?
You ask, “How can there be so many morons?”
Answered numerous times here on PZ: forty-five years of underfunded public education, resulting in undereducated voters.
Poor widdle Stevie Miller thinks this is a good idea. tRump seems to have forgotten that those pesky little trials are what let him get off scott free for so long
“If he’s this crazy in the first 100 days, what will his bottom look like, anybody want to speculate?”
Ursula, I have no interest in seeing what tRump’s “bottom look(s) like!” Why would you even ask your readers such a question? But if you insist…
I think it’s wide, very wide, and pasty white. There’s a YUGE crack down the middle and a few hairs growing out of…ahem…some parts of it. Maybe a few boils caused by the much too infrequent changing of his Depends. And the smell!!! 🤮 Well, you get the idea!
Anybody else want to chime in? Ursula wants to know. Help her out. 😃
Maybe the cult is on to something. Skip the courts since they no longer mean anything…and move on to a cigarette and blindfold…for the traitor in chief and his minions. Hmmm…it’s a thought.