President Trump has been dining with Wall Street bigwigs. He has embarked on an opulent revamp of the White House at a time when Americans are struggling to pay their bills. He has expressed support for granting visas to skilled foreigners to take jobs in the United States. He approved a $20 billion bailout for Argentina, helping a foreign government and wealthy investors at a moment when the U.S. government was shut down.
For a president who returned to office promising to avoid foreign entanglements, make life more affordable and ensure that available jobs go to American citizens, it has been a significant departure from the expectations of his loyal base. And it is starting to open a rift with his supporters who were counting on a more aggressively populist agenda.
The divisions within Mr. Trump’s movement, spawned by his own actions, have been only amplified by the latest developments on a story that he has been doing his best to quash: his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Much of the president’s MAGA movement, and many of his top aides, pushed for years for all the investigative files on the Epstein case to be made public, insisting that a rich and well-connected man — and his network of wealthy and powerful friends — needed to be held accountable for any abuse of young women.
It’s taking a toll. This survey is probably an outlier but the trend is clear:
According to a new poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, just a third of respondents — only 33 percent — said they approve of how Trump is managing the federal government. That’s a 10 percent drop from the number of Americans who said they approved of his management in a similar survey taken in March.
The survey of 1,143 adults, conducted from Nov. 6 to Nov. 10, also found that Trump’s approval rating among self-identified Republicans has taken a hit amid what was the longest government shutdown in history.
The poll found that just 68 percent of GOP-identified respondents said they approve of Trump’s management of the federal government, down from 81 percent who said they approved in March.
Trump self-soothes by telling himself that the polls are all hoaxes. But on some level he knows they aren’t. With the exception of the Epstein mess, which he seems genuinely upset about, I’m not sure he cares much anymore. He’s enjoying the love he gets from all the important people who are working him for favors and never has to face the voters again. He’s really semi-retired, spending at least half of his time redecorating, socializing and Mar-a-lago and playing golf. I think he is content with bullshitting himself into believing that his legacy will be what he deems it to be.
Other Republicans don’t have that luxury. This is starting to take a toll as you can see by the high profile defection of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Apropos of nothing, I thought this was interesting:
The latest YouGov/Economist polling, conducted between November 7 and 10, shows that Trump’s support among the oldest voters has fallen sharply since October. Last month, Baby Boomers were evenly split, with 49 percent approval and 49 percent disapproval. In the new November data, approval drops to 42 percent while disapproval climbs to 57 percent—a 15-point net decline in just one month.
I think it’s because he’s obviously demented. They (we) recognize it when they see it. They’ve also been around long enough to know just how corrupt his behavior is. I think they fooled themselves into believing that it was all a hoax but the evidence is accumulating.