On WaPo’s The Plum Line Gary Sargent believes he sees the public repudiating Trump for his belittling of certain governmental institutions in a recent poll:
It’s tempting to see this polling as little more than a reflection of Trump’s deep unpopularity. But numbers this stark suggest something else may be going on: that the depth of Trump’s contempt for our institutions and the rule of law is becoming clear to the public, and Americans are recoiling at it.
This contempt is everywhere. You see it in Trump’s double standard toward due process, documented by Adam Serwer, in which he rages at the raiding of his lawyer’s office while cheering on law enforcement abuses directed at Muslims, immigrants and African Americans. You see it in his instinct toward firing Rosenstein for the express reason that he is conducting himself by the book, rather than politicizing law enforcement to Trump’s benefit. Trump views law enforcement as primarily an instrument for carrying out his political will. He has told us this in his own words again and again and again.
Trump’s rage-tweets about Comey confirm all of this. And the public repudiation of Trump comes after he and his allies have waged an extraordinary public campaign in the right-wing media and in Congress, both of which have been weaponized to create a fictional narrative designed to shield Trump from accountability, by casting the Russia investigation and the institutional processes undergirding it as hopelessly corrupted to their core. Yet the public is siding with the rule of law and our institutions, and against Trump. As the Trump-Comey feud comes to the fore, this is the larger narrative unfolding in the background.
Personally, I’m not all that impressed with a mere 65% of the surveyed agreeing with the investigation, but it’s better than it might be. I’m also not sure I see how Gary connects that poll, which is mainly concerned with Mueller’s investigation, with the greater question of the public’s general understanding of the importance of these institutions, and how we structure government at the highest levels.
