Something Josh Marshall wrote about the right’s “Mueller’s out of control/breaking the law” narrative brought back a scene from a vintage documentary on Donald Trump, celebrity real estate developer.
Behind the new faux controversy over Mueller getting Trump transition emails is a key and probably too little discussed aspect of the Russia story: Mueller’s team has some of the most accomplished and aggressive prosecutors and legal minds of their generation. They’re facing off against a team of has-beens, 3rd or 4th rate lawyers and in some cases simple incompetents. Why? Because Trump values sycophancy above competence and because none of the top lawyers were willing to work for him.
That’s also because the dime-store tyrant would never pay their rates. He’s cheap. He wouldn’t appreciate the value they bring if you smacked him over the head with it.
In the documentary Trump: What’s the Deal?, a designer who once worked for the real estate mogul relates how Trump couldn’t comprehend why 200 year-old, Louis XVI furniture he saw at Christie’s was so expensive. He insisted he could have it reproduced for much less. As the designer tells it, Trump’s sister-in-law (who worked there) said, “Donald, you’re just never going to understand, are you?” [timestamp 3:53]
Trump once told Frank Sinatra’s manager his booking rates were “a little rich.” Trump added he wouldn’t include Sammy Davis Jr, recently diagnosed with cancer, or husband-and-wife singing duo Steve and Eydie (who he’d never heard of) in the booking for the 1990 opening of his Atlantic City casino. A disgusted Sinatra instructed manager Elliot Weisman to tell the now-president “to go f*** himself.”
The problem Team Trump has, Marshall implies, is they are seriously out-classed and either don’t know it, or do and are angry about it.
Marshall speculates:
But my guess is that they’re genuinely surprised. And since they’re surprised they assume Mueller cheated. (Is it possible Mueller did something wrong? Sure. Who knows? If so, I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough. But I doubt it. And none of the legal commentary I’ve seen suggests he did.) Beyond that, however, I suspect they now fear (no doubt rightly) that Trump officials lied during their interviews with the Special Counsel’s office and the investigators already had the emails that proved they were lying. That’s a real sinking feeling for everyone involved.
We saw plenty of hubris during the George W. Bush regime. Bush the Lightweight compensated for his lack of depth by giving hangers-on demeaning nicknames. But he knew enough to hire his daddy’s best people. Even so, the lot of them can no longer set foot outside the country for fear of immediate arrest as war criminals.
For his part, Donald refuses to surround himself with (or pay for) advisers of a quality and stature that they wouldn’t suck up to him. It shows.
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Are you stressed out? I know I am. I’m sitting here, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Tomorrow might bring news of indictments from Mueller. That should be good news, but will it be the announcement that leads to horrible news–Trump’s nuclear tweet?
We know now how Trump responds to bad news. It reminds me of stories from people with rageaholic parents. They needed to walk on tiptoes so they won’t set off dad. They changed their behavior, because they have no control over the parent’s.
What should you do if you know something is coming that will trigger a dangerous, irrational act in someone? If you are a child there isn’t much you can do, you’re usually powerless. But what if you are part of a group of adults whose duty is to check the misuse of power?
Psychiatrists often need to make determinations about a patient’s mental state. They ask “Is this person a danger to themselves or others? ” If the answer is yes, the doctors are supposed to act in a way that protects both the patient and the people who might be harmed. It’s their duty.
If you know someone is going to lash out with a massive lethal response, shouldn’t you prepare for it? What should you be doing now? For example, should you take steps to remove their easy access to weapons?
BTW, Fox News doesn’t tell you but my friend Lee Fang did, Keane has been on board of directors since of General Dynamics since 2004 and, according to the company’s most recent proxy statement, received $257,884 in compensation (including “stock awards”) in 2016. Keane is also a special adviser to Academi, the contractor formerly known as Blackwater. It was founded by Betsy Devos brother, Erik Prince.
We know cornered or wounded animals are dangerous, especially to the people in their vicinity. But their violent response is local. Humans who are cornered or wounded can also be dangerous and their response can cause destruction over great distances because of the tools we have created.
In time travel movies the idea is that if you can travel to the past and make a change, it can change the future. But you don’t have to be a time traveler to predict how some people will act, just a good observer.
Right now the President is a danger to others. We don’t follow the precautionary principle here in the US. We allow the tragic incident(s) to happen and then say, “Nobody could have predicted.”
I’ve correctly predicted how certain politicians will respond and I patted myself on the back. But my friend Cliff Schecter said it’s actually pretty easy to predict the future, it just doesn’t get you anything, unless you use that insight to change the outcome.
Yet people HAVE predicted how Trump will react. Now they are just trying to control the timing of his reaction. The GOP is rushing the tax bill through hoping it will pass and get signed before Trump’s inevitable nuclear tweet.
They have a duty to act, but they haven’t. They want the crisis to happen so they can take advantage of it. Disaster capitalism is a real thing. Should the people who fail to act, knowing the harm they are causing others, then profit from their failures?
They can if we let them. The darkest timeline should apply to them too, especially since they brought us to it.
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the majority whip, on Sunday said a tax provision, which could personally enrich key Republican lawmakers, was added to the final tax bill as part of an effort to “cobble together the votes we needed to get this bill passed.” Cornyn was pressed about the provision on ABC’s “This Week,” after an International Business Times investigationshowed that Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee suddenly switched his vote to “yes” after GOP leaders added the provision, which could boost Corker’s real estate income. A top Democratic senator, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, responded to Cornyn’s explanation by saying the language put into the bill also “would be a windfall to Donald Trump.”
As IBT first reported, the provision potentially enriching Corker, Trump and a handful of other top Republican lawmakers, was not part of the House- or Senate-passed bill, but was added by GOP lawmakers to the final bill, which was publicly released on Friday afternoon. Corker, who is not seeking re-election and is considered a crucial swing vote due to his criticism of President Trump, suddenly said he would support the final bill. He initially voted against the original bill in the Senate, which did not have the provision. Corker subsequently asserted to IBT that he did not know about the provision being added to the final bill, and he also declared he has not even read the tax bill he announced he is voting for.
The provision at issue would provide a special tax deduction on income made from so-called “pass through” entities, like real estate LLCs. The specific language would provide the lucrative tax deduction for such entities, even when they employ few or no employees — a structure that tax experts say is designed to give a tax break to real estate moguls.
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos pressed Cornyn about the provision after three senior Democratic senators responded to IBT’s report by saying the revelations meant the tax bill must be halted. At first, Cornyn said the criticism of the provision was unfair, declaring: “Picking out one piece in a 1,000-page bill and saying, ‘well, this is going to benefit somebody’ — I just think that takes the whole bill out of context.”
But then Stephanopoulos pressed Cornyn, noting that “this provision wasn’t included in either the House or the Senate bill and apparently was added at the last minute. Why was that done? Why was it necessary to include that provision?”
Cornyn responded: “Well, we were working very hard. It was a very intense process. As I said, the Democrats refused to participate. And what we’ve tried to do is cobble together the votes we needed to get this bill passed.”
Asked specifically if it was added for Corker, Cornyn said: “Well, the particular provision you’re talking about, honestly, is just one piece of a 1,000-page bill which is going to grow the American economy.”
Corker is one of the richest men in the US Senate, worth more than 50 million dollars. I guess it just isn’t enough.
KIEV, Ukraine — A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016, exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy.
Before the conversation, McCarthy and Ryan had emerged from separate talks at the Capitol with Ukrainian Prime Minister Vladimir Groysman, who had described a Kremlin tactic of financing populist politicians to undercut Eastern European democratic institutions.
News had just broken the day before in The Washington Post that Russian government hackers had penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee, prompting McCarthy to shift the conversation from Russian meddling in Europe to events closer to home.
Some of the lawmakers laughed at McCarthy’s comment. Then McCarthy quickly added: “Swear to God.”
Ryan instructed his Republican lieutenants to keep the conversation private, saying: “No leaks. . . . This is how we know we’re a real family here.”
The remarks remained secret for nearly a year.
First they denied it ever happened. Then when the reocrding of the conversation emerged, they said it was a joke.
This happened after Trump had clinched the nomination.
“By the time we untangle this massive web of corruption, it will be worse than Watergate. It will be Watergate on human growth hormones and steroids, combined, at massive levels.”
No, not Maxine Waters or Keith Olbermann. That’s Sean Hannity and he’s talking about the alleged corruption of the Mueller investigation.
If you’ve got a spare 45 minutes today, this brief overview of Watergate is worth watching. You will see similarities all right. But not between Watergate and Mueller.
One of the main similarities between Trump and Nixon is their hatred for the media. I’d guess Trump was just aping Nixon in the beginning. (He stole a lot of things from him and from Reagan but believes he’s a genius who thought it up himself.) But the point is that the hatred for the press is a primary motive for Nixon’s abuse of power.
The wonderful Nancy Ohanian has donated one of her gorgeous signed prints, “Gung Ho,” to Blue America to use for raising money for the candidates we’ve endorsed this year. She would like to see Congress flip from red to blue and so would we… and we know you would too. So this is how this works. Just contribute any amount to any of our candidates on this page. One dollar; ten dollars, $1,000… it’s up to you. Split it between all the candidates, give it to your favorite candidate or split it between 2 or 3 candidates… all up to you. (Just not more than $2,700 to any one candidate.)
If you want a chance to own this piece of American political history, the signed print “Gung Ho” by Nancy Ohanian just donate to any/some/all of the Blue America candidates on this page by Monday morning, December 18th. Best of luck!
Next week (Monday, December 18), we’ll pick one name randomly and send that person the signed “Gung Ho” print by Nancy. Easy, right?
This is an especially crucial election cycle. I don’t think there’s ever been more at stake than now with this madman in the White House and a Congress filled with enablers and cheerleaders. We can’t get Trump out of office next November… but we can and will put a check on him by defeating lots and lots of Republicans in Congress, starting with Paul Ryan and working our way down.
And what makes this cycle even more exciting is that there seems to be a mammoth anti-Trump/anti-GOP wave building and intensifying. Every poll this year has shown it. And as we saw a few weeks ago in Virginia and last week in Georgia, there are no districts that are too red to flip– IF the right candidates are running. The men and women on this list are for real progressives of good moral character and with solid work ethics. Most important, these are the people who will make Congress a better place and force Congress to make our country a better place. Please give generously.
And if you want to have a chance to win but find yourself in a tight financial situation, send a letter to Blue America at PO Box 27201, Los Angeles, CA 90027 and tell us you want to be part of the Christmas “Gung Ho” contest (be sure to include your contact info). The FEC demands we make some lawyer language available for our contests. You can find it here.
And one more thing about the progressive candidates Blue America has endorsed so far this cycle. We talk to them– sometimes for months– get to know them and we don’t endorse them until we feel as sure as is humanly possible that when they get into Congress, they will earnestly endeavor to enhance the lives of working families; make the tough decisions necessary to move our country along in a more progressive direction. Message us on the Blue America Facebook page to let us know if you want more information on any particular candidate.
Thanks for always doing what you can to make this a better world,
You think the country is giving us their best people? No. What kind of a system is that? They come in by lottery. They give us their worst people, they put them in a bin, but in his hand when he’s picking him are really the worst of the worst.”The President of the United States 12/15/2017
This New York Times article reports how the name “Trump” is being used as a weapon against racial and ethnic minorities in this country, especially among young people. It’s sickening:
The high school basketball squad from Eagle Grove, population 3,700, had traveled 60 miles up Highway 69 in Iowa to play the team from Forest City, population 4,100. It would be the Eagles against the Indians, a hardwood competition in the center of the country. For some people, this is as American as it gets.
At one point during the online streaming of the game last month, two white announcers for a Forest City radio station, KIOW, began riffing on the Hispanic names of some players from the mildly more diverse community of Eagle Grove. “They’re all foreigners,” said Orin Harris, a longtime announcer; his partner, Holly Jane Kusserow-Smidt, a board operator at the station who was also a third-grade teacher, answered: “Exactly.”
For some people, this is as American as it gets.
Mr. Harris then uttered a term occasionally used these days as a racially charged taunt, or as a braying assertion that the country is being taken back from forces that threaten it. That term is, simply, the surname of the sitting American president.
“As Trump would say, go back where they came from,” Mr. Harris said.
“Well, some would say that, yeah,” Ms. Kusserow-Smidt said. “Some days I feel like that, too.”
Apparently hate crimes are way up, particularly against Latinos and Muslims. Gee, I wonder why?
Well, the racist idiots who are doing it helpfully provide the answer:
Peppered among these incidents is a phenomenon distinct from the routine racism so familiar in this country: the provocative use of “Trump,” after the man whose comments about Mexicans, Muslims and undocumented immigrants — coupled with his muted responses to white nationalist activity — have proved so inflammatory. His words have also become an accelerant on the playing field of sports, in his public criticism of black athletes he deems to be unpatriotic or ungrateful.
Officials at Salem State University in Massachusetts discovered hateful graffiti spray-painted on benches and a fence surrounding the baseball field, including “Trump #1 Whites Only USA.” An undocumented immigrant in Michigan reported to the police that two assailants had stapled a note bearing a slur to his stomach after telling him, “Trump doesn’t like you.” A white Massachusetts businessman at Kennedy International Airport in New York was charged with assaulting and menacing an airline worker in a hijab, saying, among other threats: “Trump is here now. He will get rid of all of you.”
In an email, the White House on Friday denounced the use of the president’s name in cases like these. “The president condemns violence, bigotry and hatred in all its forms, and finds anyone who might invoke his or any other political figure’s name for such aims to be contemptible,” Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, said.
Still, it persists. Across the country, students have used the president’s name to mock or goad minority opponents at sporting events. In March, white fans at suburban Canton High School in Connecticut shouted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as players from Hartford’s Classical Magnet School, which is predominantly black and Latino, took foul shots during a basketball playoff game. They also chanted “He’s our president!”
The visiting players and their chaperones interpreted the chants not as a sudden burst of presidential fealty, but rather as a slyly racist mantra intended to rattle. As if Donald J. Trump was the president of here, in white suburbia, and not there, in the diverse inner city.
“I’m not sure what politics has to do with basketball,” Azaria Porter, then the Classical team’s 16-year-old manager, told The Hartford Courant. “It was just annoying. It was like, O.K., we get it.”
And this is yet another way in which Trump is unique in American political life:
According to several scholars of American history, the invocation of a president’s name as a jaw-jutting declaration of exclusion, rather than inclusion, appears to be unprecedented. “If you’re hunting for historical analogies, I think you’re in virgin territory,” said Jon Meacham, the author of several books about presidents, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Andrew Jackson.
Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, agrees. “If you’re looking at modern presidents, fill in the blank and see if it can be used in the same way,” he said. “You will see it has not. Hoover? Or Eisenhower? Can you imagine a situation like that?”
The jarring use of Mr. Trump’s name began to surface shortly after he declared his candidacy in June 2015. Within a year, educators were reporting incidents in which, as the Inside Higher Ed website put it, “Trump” had become “a kind of taunt, tossed by largely white students at minority opponents during, say, basketball games.”
But it was not confined to high schools like Dallas Center-Grimes in Iowa, where students mocked a basketball team from the more diverse community of Perry with chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump” in February 2016. Colleges and universities were experiencing similar moments.
Nor was it confined to places of learning. In March 2016, for example, video surveillance at a Kwik Shop in Wichita, Kan., showed a white motorcyclist arguing with two college students — one Hispanic, one Muslim — then assaulting one of them before driving off. The victims later said that the man interspersed his racist epithets with: “Trump, Trump, Trump.” (And yes, the name does tend to come in threes, as if the incantation of his name might summon the man himself.)
Shortly after the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes, published a report called “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the 2016 Election on Our Nation’s Schools.” Based on a survey of more than 10,000 educators, it detailed an increase in incidents involving swastikas, Nazi salutes and Confederate flags.
“Kids saying, ‘Trump won, you’re going back to Mexico,’” wrote a teacher from Kansas. “A black student was blocked from entering his classroom by two white students chanting, ‘Trump, Trump,’” wrote a teacher from Tennessee. “Seventh-grade white boys yelling, ‘Heil Trump!’” wrote a teacher from Colorado…
Mr. Beschloss recalled moments in recent American history when, say, the X in President Richard M. Nixon’s name appeared as a swastika, or a caricature of President Lyndon B. Johnson featured a Hitlerian mustache. But these were generally the acts of opponents to those presidents’ policies during the Vietnam War.
“The message here,” Mr. Beschloss said, “is ‘Trump is going to come and get you — and we support that.’”
He’s very special, as he is the first to tell you:
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of race, history and public policy also at the Kennedy School of Government, said that Mr. Trump had created his own breakaway brand, making him the personification of specific ideals.
“To use the name as a rallying cry for a kind of embodied white supremacy, white nationalism or sense of triumphalism, for taking back the country, as best as I can tell has never been crystallized in the name of a U.S. president,” Mr. Muhammad said.
“It’s authoritarian, the cult of personality,” Mr. Meacham said. “It’s saying that we’re American — and you’re not.”
The sporadic episodes — as chronicled by ProPublica’s “Documenting Hate” project, among others — continue. A “Heil Trump” here, the Trump name scrawled beside a swastika there. In late September, two high school football teams in the Salt Lake City suburbs were squaring off when cheers erupted. Someone was brandishing a cardboard cutout of Mr. Trump, and there began the chanting of three words that have electrified some and unnerved others: “Build the wall! Build the wall!”
The two Iowa radio guys were fired for saying what they said, which at least shows some residual decency.They apologized and I’d imagine they actually do feel bad about saying it. But it spoke volumes about them nonetheless. The casual way in which Trump supporters speak about this stuff is a clear indication of how common it is within their bubble. They are happy to be swimming in that toxic pool of xenophobia and racism until they are reminded that it’s indecent. They’ve lost their bearings in this Trumpian environment and forget that other people are affected by these ugly hateful thoughts.
The xenophobic words of the two announcers stung some of the Eagle Grove players, including Nikolas Padilla, whose mother is from Iowa and whose father is from Mexico. Mr. Padilla, a 17-year-old senior, said that he briefly considered quitting because he did not want to be singled out for his Mexican heritage.
One particular comment by the broadcasters — “As Trump would say, go back where they came from” — puzzled Nikolas. His mother, Misty, recalled what her teenage son had said:
“Um, I came from Mason City, Iowa.”
I hate to tell you kid but the real issue is that just don’t like your last name or the color of your skin. Where they think you were born isn’t really the issue, it’s just an excuse.
By the way, this started the minute that asshole got elected:
A lawyer from the Trump transition team accused Robert Mueller on Saturday of illegally obtaining thousands of transition emails as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. In a letter to the Senate Homeland Security and House Oversight and Government Reform committees, Kory Langhofer, representing Trump for America (TFA), alleges Fourth Amendment violations ans well as possible violations of attorney-client privilege. Mueller’s team obtained the emails last summer from the General Services Administration.
The complaint from the Trump for America group comes a day after a warning from Adam Schiff, a senior Democrat, that top Republicans are manoeuvring to shut down the House intelligence committee’s Trump–Russia inquiry and weaken Mueller. Some reports suggest Donald Trump is considering firing Mueller, whom he appointed as special counsel to oversee the FBI and justice department investigation of contacts between the Russian government and Trump’s election campaign.
Mueller spokesman Peter Carr released a statement early this morning, stating, “When we have obtained emails in the course of our ongoing criminal investigation, we have secured either the account owner’s consent or appropriate criminal process.”
The Guardian report adds:
In an interview with Buzzfeed News, the GSA deputy counsel, Lenny Loewentritt, said the Trump transition team were told when they were given access to GSA facilities that any material “would not be held back in any law enforcement” situation. “Therefore, no expectation of privacy can be assumed.”
An air of panic seems to have set in among the president’s faithful as Mueller’s Russia investigation reaches into the Oval Office.
Plum Line’s Greg Sargent pointed to another flinging-anything-at-the-wall session last night by Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro:
This is the clearest example yet of the concerted Big Lie campaign that is underway to goad Trump into full-blown authoritarianism, autocracy, and lawlessness:https://t.co/2L3vccfYi7https://t.co/iIycqscQU7— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) December 17, 2017
Commenting on Langhofer’s accusations, former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said in a tweet, “If Mueller didn’t follow the law, a court would suppress the evidence so it couldn’t be used. The reason Trump’s lawyers are writing letters to Congress instead of Mueller or a court is because their legal arguments have no merit.” Sargent replied, “The reason they are doing this is to give Fox News and select House Republicans more material to beat the drum that the Mueller probe is illegitimate.”
But there is another level to why the Trump transition team is squealing so loudly over the GSA emails. Marcy Wheeler explains:
Kory Lanhofer is insinuating — without quite risking the claim — that after GSA shared certain emails with Robert Mueller’s office, “unknown persons” leaked them to the press. The insinuation is that Mueller’s team leaked them.
I can think of just one set of emails that fit this description: emails from KT McFarland that provided proof that Mike Flynn lied to the FBI about his conversations with Sergei Kislyak on December 29, 2016. The NYT quoted extensively from them in a December 2 story.
That would be the Russia “has just thrown the U.S.A. election to” Trump thread. Wheeler continues:
But consider the other implication of this: Lanhofer is suggesting that this email chain (which included no named active lawyers, nor included Trump directly, though they were written in Trump’s presence at Mar a Lago) is “susceptible to privilege claims.” He is further suggesting that GSA is the only way this email could have been released (ignoring, of course, the Bannon/Priebus/Spicer) options.
If that’s right, then he’s suggesting that Trump was involved in this email chain directly. There’s no reason to believe he was CCed. But since the emails were written from Mar-a-Lago, it’s likely he was consulted in the drafting of the emails.
In addition, Lanhofer is also admitting that Trump’s team didn’t release these emails directly — at least not to Congress.
A White House that has never displayed a reflex for anything other than attacking its foes will fully support egging on any and all of Mueller’s critics as the investigation closes in on the Oval Office. All the advice about the perils of firing Mueller will not phase him, so it is best to be prepared to take to the streets when the time comes.
His loss in Alabama may have wounded him, but passage of the tax bill this week, as seems likely, will erase that from memory. He’ll be drunk and bulletproof and primed to do something spectacularly stupid.
And his cultish followers? The phrase “dying moments of the cobra” comes to mind. Except in this case, it is likely to be a zombie cobra. Even when it looks dead, it won’t be.
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Don’t worry GOPers. Trump is coming to your state to help you win. Lol.by digby
That’s your average GOP office holder drinking poison on hearing the news
I’m sure members of the GOP up for re-election in 2018 are thrilled to hear this news:
President Trump is not on the ballot in 2018, but the White House is planning a full-throttle campaign to plunge the president into the midterm elections, according to senior officials and advisers familiar with the planning.
Trump’s political aides have met with 116 candidates for office in recent months, according to senior White House officials, seeking to become involved in Senate, House and gubernatorial races — and possibly contested Republican primaries as well.
The president has told advisers that he wants to travel extensively and hold rallies and that he is looking forward to spending much of 2018 campaigning. He has also told aides that the elections would largely determine what he can get done — and that he expects he would be blamed for losses, such as last week’s humiliating defeat that handed a Senate seat in Alabama to a Democrat for the first time in 25 years.
“For the president, this isn’t about adulation and cheering crowds,” White House political director Bill Stepien said in an interview. “This is about electing and reelecting Republicans.”
Monmouth’s initial generic House ballot match-up for the 2018 election finds Democrats holding a 15 point advantage over Republicans.
Pres. Trump’s current job rating stands at a net negative 32% approve and 56% disapprove. This marks his lowest rating in Monmouth’s polling since taking office in January. Prior polls conducted over the course of the past year showed his approval rating ranging from 39% to 43% and his disapproval rating ranging from 46% to 53%.
The decline in Trump’s job rating has come much more from women – currently 24% approve to 68% disapprove – than from men – currently 40% to 44%. In September, Trump had a 36%-55% rating among women and a 44%-42% rating among men.
The gender gap in the president’s rating crosses party lines. Republican women (67%) are somewhat less likely than Republican men (78%) to give Trump a positive rating. These results are down by 9 points among GOP women since September and by 5 points among GOP men since the fall. The biggest drop has occurred among independent women – just 14% currently approve of Trump’s job performance, which is down by 25 points since September. Among independent men, 31% approve of Trump, down 10 points. Democrats’ ratings of Trump have held steady at just 8% approval among Democratic men and 7% among Democratic women.
He’s got a long way to recover if he’s going to be a “help” to Republicans next year.
But they can’t stop him. Standing in front of a big crowd that’s cheering on his crude insults and lies is the only part of the job he likes.
