THEY'RE IN THE HOUSE!

Why Trump's "underwater" polling numbers will drown us all.

This is from a Nate Cohn piece this week in The New York Times:

We have the first New York Times/Siena College poll since the election, and almost everyone will probably agree on this much: The findings are not good for President Trump.

You would be hard pressed to find a single “good” number for Mr. Trump in the survey.

His job approval rating is just 42 percent, and voters disapproved of his handling of every issue tested in the survey, including longstanding strengths like immigration and the economy.

Only 43 percent view him favorably, down from 48 percent in the final Times/Siena poll before the election and the lowest since his attempted assassination last July.

On question after question, voters say he’s going too far.

That’s not exactly a maverick take on the subject. I’ve read literally thousands of such stories over the past 15 years. To borrow Cohn’s construction, in “poll analysis after poll analysis,” journalists characterize (as they always have) public opinion of Trump as a crippling negative. This is from CNN on April 27:

… as the 100-day mark of his presidency approaches, Americans’ views of what he’s done so far have turned deeply negative, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS finds.

Trump’s 41% approval rating is the lowest for any newly elected president at 100 days dating back at least to Dwight Eisenhower – including Trump’s own first term.

Approval of Trump’s handling of the presidency is down 4 points since March, and 7 points lower than it was in late February. Just 22% say they strongly approve of Trump’s handling of the job, a new low, and about twice as many say they strongly disapprove (45%).

And here’s another from the Times on Monday, again about the latest Siena poll, offering as political analysis the second most startlingly insipid observation I have ever heard:

More than 100 days into Trump’s second term, many voters have heard little about the major news events that have defined his return to the White House.

Voters who are not as familiar with Trump’s doings gave him higher marks than voters who paid closer attention to the news, a poll from the New York Times and Siena College indicated.

Wait … there are underinformed voters out there? You’re kidding! Can it really be possible that a significant percentage of the population is less curious, less literate, less politically engaged or even less intelligent than others? I’d say “No way, Jose!,” except that Jose has been illegally deported to South Sudan. Once again, The Great Gray Lady outdoes herself. (By the way, that observation, in all its numbing banality, was a very close second only to something I heard one teenager say to his pal while browsing in a Blockbuster store back in the 1980s. “Did you ever notice that even the hottest girls in our school aren’t as hot as the ones in movies?” Very, very close.)

If you’ll permit me, I shall now presume to rewrite Nate Cohn’s lede to reflect how the story should have been covered:

We have the first New York Times/Siena College poll since the election, and the results are shocking. A lying, childish, corrupt, racist, petty ignoramus – who has gone to economic war with the world, torn the Constitution into scraps and tried to flush them down a low-flow toilet, and is trying his hardest to cripple the elderly and the poor – has the support of 42% of the American electorate!

I’m not making that up: 42% of our fellow voting-age citizens are watching democracy, rule of law and basic human dignity daily pummeled and all 110 million of them are thumbs up to that. The Department of Justice and federal police agencies have been turned into the Gestapo. The Republicans in Congress are in lockstep like the soldiers of Oz. Trump’s appointees are fascists and Christian Taliban and his policies are creating a New World Disorder, although 110 million vile dipshits just can’t get enough of it.

Now, I’ve also read many an obtuse “think piece” — including my own book, American Manifesto — trying to come to terms with MAGA and Trump’s appeal. They have in general done a pretty good job explaining the grievances of the right, from loss of prosperity, to loss of its racial and ethnic supermajority, to genuine corruption, cowardice and dishonesty in the political class, to the “tyranny of the left,” which has turned historic, 20th-century protections of individual, civil and human rights into a free-for-all of ever-narrower social-justice doctrine. Miranda. School prayer. Civil Rights Act. Voting Rights Act. All of that post-WWII change was liberalism in all its glory. More recently, Roe v. Wade and gay marriage rights were long overdue. But leftist speech codes, obsession with cultural “appropriation” and the bizarre, ruinously self-defeating micro-issue of trans women playing women’s sports seem almost calculated to embolden rightwingers — and, thanks to the evil Mark Zuckerberg and soulless, greedy cynics, empower them. Throw in billionaire industrialists with the foresight — 75 years ago! — to systematically mobilize the disaffected and gerrymander Congressional districts, and boy did the Republicans ever strike oil!

What was once called Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” poaching underinformed white working class voters from the Democratic Party, yielded a historic gusher of resentment that released hitherto repressed selfishness, racism, anti-Semitism and Biblical extremism, all of which is now toppling our supposed bedrock values. Habeus corpus is under attack. Voting rights are under attack. The melting pot is now a “woke” nightmare of DEI marginalizing white people. I expect the Statue of Liberty to be deported, too, any day now. Let those French commies worry about the tired and the poor, yearning to breathe free. We have Ayatollah Trump as our moral North Star.

But don’t fool yourself. These 42% are not some new phenomenon. Selfishness, racism, misogyny, retrograde religious doctrine and distrust have always been there. What changed were the circumstances, economic, demographic and technological. Our values weren’t carved out of bedrock. It’s just that there was a social penalty to publicly embracing the twisted ideologies of the Ku Klux Klan, Father Coughlin, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the American Nazi Party and the 1980s militia movement. If there were a Facebook and Fox News and X throughout the whole 20th century, Jim Crow would still be here, women wouldn’t have the vote and we would have entered neither World War I nor World War II.

We are not a 100% fascist country. But we are 42%. Which means, as I’ve been saying now for many years, we have all, for our entire lives, been fed a Big Lie. The evil isn’t just out there somewhere, like spies or measles. Call 911. IT IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!

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