And neither are his policies
Donald Trump has the highest approval rating of either of his presidencies right now and he’s still below or just at 50%, the lowest of any president at this point in their presidency except himself in 2017. That hasn’t stopped him and his lackeys from insisting that he has an unprecedented mandate to enact a radical agenda, based upon what they ludicrously call a landslide victory. In reality he won the popular vote by 1.5% and didn’t reach a majority and his electoral college victory was a tepid 312. Compared to real landslides such as Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 when he won 49 states by a popular vote margin of 18 points, it’s embarrassing that they even have the nerve to claim one but that’s just how they roll.
According to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll “45% of Americans approve of Trump’s performance as president, down slightly from 47% in a Jan. 20-21 poll. The share who disapproved was slightly larger at 46%, an increase from 39% in the prior poll.” And regarding Trump’s early policy moves, the majority disapproves of almost all of them.
While it’s true that the one issue that gets majority support is “downsizing the federal government” it’s fair to assume that a majority do not believe that abruptly freezing the funding of important medical research, children’s health or veterans care without notice, which Trump and his Project 2025 acolytes have done in the past few days, is the way to do it.
You will note that after ending requirements that government employees report gifts and investments and renaming the Gulf Of Mexico, the most unpopular move that Trump has made is the pardons of the January 6th rioters. Only the most hardcore MAGA true believers support his actions and it tells you that Trump’s belief that America at large sees the violent actions of that day as justified is very wrong. (Even Trump’s biggest fan, S. Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has said publicly that it was a mistake.)
Not that he seems the least bit concerned about that. Over the weekend Trump appeared at a rally in Las Vegas with Stewart Rhodes, the head of the Oath Keepers whose 18 year sentence for seditious conspiracy Trump commuted. According to a recording obtained by CBS News, he’s the guy who said “my only regret is they should have brought rifles, we should have brought rifles. We could have fixed it right then and there. I’d hang fu**ing Pelosi from the lamppost.” What a guy.
Trump said that all the prisoners were patriots who love their country. Meanwhile, one pardon recipient was killed by police in a shootout just days after being released, another is wanted on charges of solicitation of a minor and another is facing trial on state charges of pedophilia and possession of child pornography. It’s highly likely they will not be the last to find themselves back behind bars or worse before too long. Everyone in this country and around the world saw what those violent criminals did that day.
Trump is so driven to “prove” that everyone should believe him rather than their lying eyes that he has appointed one of the organizers of the “Stop The Steal” gathering on January 6th, a man named Ed Martin, to be the interim US Attorney for Washington DC. At a rally on January 5th, Martin spoke before the excited crowd and exhorted “die-hard true Americans” to work until their “last breath” to “stop the steal.” He was at the Capitol the next but says he didn’t think anything was “out of hand.” He tweeted this as the crowd had already breached the building and was engaging in a violent battle with police:
Martin has also been a big part of the Patriot Freedom Project, advocating for the J6 defendants and holding fundraisers for them. If there is someone with a greater conflict of interest to be involved in these cases I can’t imagine who it would be. But that isn’t stopping him. Martin has instigated one of those patented Trumpy “investigation of the investigations” to review what he calls the “great failures” of the prosecutors to use a charge that was later disallowed by the Supreme Court, despite the fact that all but one of the judges that heard the cases before it landed in the high court upheld it. He has also disbanded the DOJ’s Capitol Siege Section and was the one who moved to dismiss all the pending J6 cases.
The New York Times reports that over at Main Justice, Acting Attorney General James McHenry “fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on the two criminal investigations into Donald J. Trump for the special counsel Jack Smith, saying they could not be trusted to “faithfully implement” the president’s agenda.” Career prosecutors are supposed to follow the rule of law without fear or favor not “faithfully implement” anyone’s political agenda but apparently those rules have changed. Trump now sees the DOJ as his personal law firm which makes sense since he’s staffing it with all of his defense lawyers from his criminal, impeachment and civil trials.
And then we have Kash Patel who will be facing his confirmation hearings this week as he prepares to take over the FBI and do without question what former FBI Directors James Comey and Christopher Wray refused to do: act as Trump’s personal henchman.
I wrote about Patel a couple of months ago when I was still in shock that he could possibly be confirmed for such an important law enforcement position. He is, as I said then, apparently driven by the same persecution complex as Trump and has developed an equal thirst for revenge. Members of the Intelligence Community have begged the Senate not to confirm him as have former Republican national security officials. Revelations are coming out daily about his malfeasance in his former positions during Trump’s first term, always because he was operating as Trump’s propaganda minister regardless of the actual job he held.
USA Today reported this week that Patel was one of the members of Trump’s inner circle most responsible for “recasting” January 6th as a patriotic protest rather than the violent insurrection we all watched in horror as it unfolded. He spread lies about the FBI instigating the riot that day and pushed the bogus Ray Epps conspiracy theory. He even produced that depraved January 6th Prison Choir rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. It’s hard to think of anyone worse to be in the role of FBI Director.
All of this is happening in the shadow of Trump’s repeated flouting of the law, from his odious Executive Order banning Birthright Citizenship to the unauthorized firing of almost all of the Independent Inspector Generals to his refusal to fund programs for which the Congress has appropriated the money, which is their job. His brazen lawlessness is already beyond most people’s expectations or even imagination and he’s just getting started.
The American people are not in favor of any of it and they are almost certainly going to like it less and less as it all unfolds. Trump’s twisted psychological need to believe that he won in a landslide and is therefore vindicated in his lies about 2020 has given him a monumental case of hubris. He’ll do a lot of damage before he’s done but he will never have the popular approbation he craves, now or in the future.
Salon