Over the last eight months, give or take, President Trump has had three ongoing opportunities to fulfill his primary responsibility as President: Be a leader. These opportunities, for those of us asleep at the proverbial switch, are the Covid-19 outbreak, the economic collapse that was a consequence of the quarantine that the States were forced enforce, mostly, on the advice of epidemiologists, and, finally, the unrest caused by the murder of George Floyd by Officer Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department (just a few miles from here). If he’d fulfilled his role, his approval numbers would be sky-high, just President Bush’s after the Towers fell.
I like the Gallup polls because they have decades of experience, they’re fairly conservative, meaning I’m not likely to be led astray as I might by polling services that might have a more liberal tilt, much like Rasmussen is known for its conservative tilt, and for consistency – I’ve cited many Gallup polls over the years. I am aware that FiveThirtyEight rates them a B, while the ABC News/The Washington Post service is rated an A+. With that in mind, this may be quite a shock to the conservative reader: the latest Gallup Presidential Approval Poll:
It’s hard to spin a drop of 10 points to 39% approval over two weeks as anything but a disaster, and I’m not in that business anyways. While the public appeared to have been somewhat willing to give President Trump the benefit of the doubt when it came to Covid-19 and the consequent economic collapse, since we haven’t seen a pandemic of this virulence in a very long time, we have short memories, and not many Americans pay close enough attention to his official actions vs his overactive mouth and fingers, his reactions to the protests over the George Floyd killing have been a catastrophe for public perception of his competency.
FiveThirtyEight’s Poll of Polls. Not quite the same as Gallup’s poll, as approval and popularity are not synonyms.
This, of course, should come as no surprise. Business people are not trained for, and are not expected to deal with, problems of this magnitude. These are problems primarily of a political, communal nature, and while his incompetence in reference to the first two appear to have hardly touched him in the Gallup poll, the glaring, in your face divisive and authoritarian reaction to the protests, and the hollow attempts to blame Antifa in the face of a lack of evidence of their involvement (reported on here and here) once again reveals him as the manipulative & dishonest person that he is as well as his lack of aptitude and training for the job. While his business bona fides, questionable as they are, were acceptable to many voters in 2016, the raw truth should be coming quite clear:
There’s more to being a politician than making promises hearkening back to some Golden Age and saying outrageous things about opponents. Amateurs may be appealing, but they are fool’s gold.
The latest monthly CNN Poll by SSRS, showing Trump approval numbers dropping from from 45% to 38%. Reportedly, the Trump Campaign sent CNN a cease and desist letter, demanding a retraction and apology, which CNN refused. They really should have just posted an article consisting of laughter.
Yep, that campaign rhetoric of 2016 might have been delightful to the hard-right conservative voter, but in the end it, along with his lack of track record in the public sphere, were a big red flag that he was the wrong choice. The Republican primary voter in 2016 had a plethora of choices, and yet enough of those voters chose Trump to push him over the top; in retrospect, I wonder if fewer choices might have left Trump out of the winner’s circle. On the other hand, the base desperately wanted red meat, and while the Republican Party boasted many ambitious candidates, none were particularly impressive individuals. Perhaps Governor Kasich (R-OH) would qualify, but he didn’t appeal to the base. In a Party that was constantly fed the misinformation that Democratic President Obama was wrecking the economy domestically, and internationally endangering the country through the Iran Deal (JCPOA) and losing national prestige, the base was, purposefully or not, being trained to believe the unbelievable was true. Trump told them we were in the middle of a crime wave, the economy was a wreck, Clinton was a Russian puppet even as he publicly begged the Russians for help, that any governmentally-supplied number that didn’t help him was a lie, and the base, trained to believe, did as told: it believed, it stepped forward, and it voted for him, and categorically labeled those sources as fake news.
And now, here we are with someone who’s so incompetent and clueless that I, quite frankly, have begun ignoring. He’s being outrageous again? Good, more fodder for Colbert on The Late Show. It’s not late night at the moment? Then please don’t bother me with President Irrelevancy, because the United States has a lot of shit to clean up and the more we listen to him, the higher that shit pile gets.
From The Blob trailer.
Shameful, maybe. He wields a lot of power and has quite a few levers he can pull in order to wreck the United States even more, but whether he’s a Russian thumb-puppet following orders, or the iconic barroom blowhard given a chance to implement his ill-informed opinions, I’m no longer fascinated with him, and I certainly don’t respect him; I never really did, once it became clear he was a congenital liar. I try to pay attention because I should, but it’s like salt in the wound, sandpaper on the nerves. He’s The Blob ingesting the guy under the car.
But what does this crash potentially mean? Depends on the topic. Former VP Biden has begun modeling what he will do as President, showing compassion to the Floyd family by recording a video but not disturbing his memorial in Houston. He speaks from the heart, as someone who has lost his first wife, baby daughter, and an adult son, and speaks directly to Floyd’s daughter, offering adult sympathy and guidance on the road ahead. Contrast that to Trump’s offerings. If Biden can keep this up, we may see a landslide of near Nixon-McGovern-esqe magnitude.
The Republican Party may now reap what it’s sown, which were lies, in a disaster. We may see Senate seats that were considered safe before this began suddenly become seriously contested. All that money Trump and the RNC have received from rich donors may suddenly not be enough to cover all the advertising they’ll feel is necessary.
And advertising may not do the job this time around.
I personally hope that some quasi-religious tenets will come up for public discussion and review: Are taxes always evil? Is Regulation always bad? Is profit all that’s important?
How do we truly begin to erase racism? That’s the most important problem, of course. But concomitant with that is the recognition that a roaring economy doesn’t solve the question; it’s quite the other way around, only once racism is at least in the process of being erased can an economy be truly classified as roaring. If only investors, who are overwhelming white, are doing well, then the economy is not really doing well because the economy is about the citizenry, and if not all of the communities are benefiting, then it’s not roaring as much as we’d like to believe. And, as an investor, I do not consider investors to be deserving to be the primary recipient of corporate profits.
There are so many other implications to this slide. If the next few polls show Trump heading for the low 30s or even the upper 20s, then Trump is finished. He simply hasn’t the intellectual capacity to turn it around. His ideology is flawed, his bigotry becoming well known, and his refusal to lead painfully obvious. Another politician … wouldn’t have let it get this bad.
I’ve noticed CNN has been running headlines about the competition to be Trump’s political heir.
In the face of his dreadful incompetence, I have to ask: Which idiot could possibly want that mantle? Continuous mendacity is not a political ideology, it’s a mental disorder. Every chaser after this mantle should simply be ejected from office at the next opportunity.
