A month ago I surveyed the state of the citizenry’s Presidential Job Approval after a steep drop. I’ve been wondering if Trump, despite his recent & continuing dreadful performance, would experience a bounce. I’ve been monitoring FiveThirtyEight’s dynamic poll of polls of Trump popularity, and it gave no hint of such a thing – here is tonight’s:
But, perhaps more to the point, is the monthly Gallup Job Approval poll, which gave a big signal last month of a failing President Trump’s incompetence finally becoming apparent to the electorate. It dropped about 10 points last month, so how is it now?
Disapproval holds steady, Approval drops a statistically insignificant single point.
Just the fact that he didn’t get a bounce, not even the fabled Dead cat bounce in the FiveThirtyEight poll, suggests his continual divisiveness and incompetence is only charming for a small portion of the voters. I do hope the rest remember their dissatisfaction in November.
But it also remains true that roughly 38% of voters still approve of Trump. Speaking as an independent, this is a deeply dismaying number. True, a fair number refuse to pay attention to politics, finding it incomprehensible, disgusting, or both, or they’re too busy, or they’re stuck in the epistemic bubble – I have a friend or two like that. But I’m disturbed at the idea that, like the Confederates and wannabe Confederates who’ve kept alive the rebellious and revisionist belief that the Civil War was all about States’ rights and not about keeping slavery alive, there may be a nucleus who’ll worship Trump and spread propaganda about how he was the Second Coming who was screwed over the Evil Democrats. The celebration of amateur-hour incompetence is surely a dagger near the heart of success, isn’t it? That would be poison in our chalice. I have to agree with Jennifer Rubin’s observation:
That said, if the numbers remain anything like those we now see in state and national polls, a reckoning of enormous proportions is coming. If Americans of good will, despite different policy views and different educational, regional, racial and ethnic backgrounds, can focus on what currently binds them together — disgust with an anti-democratic, anti-pluralistic, anti-immigrant and anti-justice president — we might just enjoy a “new birth of freedom” similar to what Abraham Lincoln extolled in his Gettysburg Address. Just as Confederates had to be vanquished on the battlefield, their modern-day successors must be obliterated at the ballot box. Only then can we get about the business of cleaning up the mess Trump leaves behind, reforming our democratic institutions, tearing down the vestiges of voter suppression and addressing major issues ranging from climate change to economic inequality. But first, Trump and his enablers have to lose — very badly. [WaPo]
If this is not accomplished, we may find ourselves despised by all those Americans which will follow us. This isn’t a war, but it’s a discussion for which one side has the winning arguments – and the other side will not capitulate only if they remain stubbornly intellectually dishonest.
