A majority of Americans oppose Donald Trump’s plans to use the U.S. military to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, to instruct the U.S. Justice Department to investigate his political rivals and to pardon rioters charged with breaking into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to a nationwide Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.
Even larger majorities of Americans oppose Trump’s plans to jail reporters for writing stories he doesn’t like and having police use force against anti-Trump protests.
The survey of 1,251 Americans was conducted weeks after Trump’s victory and sought to examine public sentiment about positions espoused by the president-elect that challenge democratic principles and strain constitutional norms, as well as views on the legitimacy of American elections after Trump’s win. Trump has claimed a broad mandate for his proposals and has selected cabinet secretaries and other executive branch officials who have expressed eagerness to carry them out. But the poll results indicate that Americans reject many of the proposals that experts say could erode the guardrails that help keep presidential power in check.
I think Serwer’s got it right. People told themselves he wouldn’t really do any of the things he said he was going to do. It was just a show. He’s just owning the libs! No more tampons on boys bathrooms! No more schools doing transgender surgery! Hahahaha!
What they are getting instead is a possible government shutdown because Elon Musk objected to the bipartisan deal and once Trump came off the golf course he went along. (He had been privy to all the negotiations. He’s lying when he says he wasn’t. Johnson doesn’t make a move without him. ) Now the Republicans are negotiating among themselves without the Democrats and they will try to pass a bill through the House without Democratic votes and now, it appears likely, without all the Republicans either which means it will fail. There’s also a Democratic Senate and there’s no way they’ll get 60 votes there.
They think they can then blame the Democrats for the shutdown but I’m pretty sure that’s not going to work. Republicans always get the blame for shutdowns because they are always the ones responsible. They’ll get the blame this time too. Democrats were going to vote for the CR that was negotiated in good faith between both parties until President Musk and his puppet decided to kill it.
Let the games begin:
Tip o’ the iceberg. The chaos is overwhelming.
As I write this the saga over the continuing resolution is still ongoing and nobody knows what’s going to happen. It’s a moving target.
Paul Krugman writes that it’s not just the rubes who believe the Trump Show is just a fun comedy:
[S]ince the election financial markets have clearly been betting that Trump will do very little of what he promised during the campaign — that we won’t really have a trade war, just some minor trade skirmishes, that we’ll have symbolic deportations rather than a mass roundup of immigrants, and so on. Markets have, in effect, discounted the disastrous consequences that would follow if Trump honored his own promises.
But a government shutdown in response to completely false claims about what’s in an innocuous short-term funding measure suggests that the peddlers of misinformation are high on their own supply. Trump may really believe that foreigners will pay tariffs, that U.S. trade deficits subsidize the rest of the world, that there’s a reserve army of American workers available to fill the gaps deportation would create. I don’t want to put too much weight on the latest market fluctuations, but it is starting to look as if investors are questioning their own complacency.
Nobody believes Trump will do what he says he’s going to do. That should strike them as weird but apparently they just think that somehow, behind the scenes, very competent producers are going to make sure that everything continues smoothly without any real disruption. Nope. To the extent those people exist, they are going to get rid of every last one of them. This is just a preview.
Elon Musk, high on something, is running the show from his Truth Social platform while Trump plays golf and holds court. Nobody knows what’s going to happen but we know it’s going to be bad. Somebody should tell the people.