It’s key to what’s got people so pessimistic and angry:
“There’s a sense that this is a pretty chaotic administration,” said Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster and political consultant with 40 years of experience, speaking with Politico Monday.
“And it seems to remind people of the pandemic period in the first term. Joe Biden’s fundamental message in 2020 was to restore normalcy, and that seemed to be persuasive to enough people to get him elected.”
Indeed, many have described Trump’s second stint in the White House as “chaotic,” with its unpredictability only increasing in recent months.
For instance, the Trump administration has increasingly pivoted from its previous positions. Trump has backtracked on his bid to acquire Greenland, the administration announced plans to end its immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota, and Trump’s recent threat towards Canada over a bridge came and went with no follow-through.
That chaos, Ayres argued, had largely been responsible for bringing Trump’s approval ratings to “his lowest point in the second term.” As of Friday, a new AP-NORC poll found that Trump’s approval rating sits at 36%, a figure that Ayres warned could spell doom for the Republican Party this fall.
The problem is that the chaos is intentional and even if it wasn’t Trump doesn’t know how to operate any differently because he still doesn’t know how to do the job. It’s all flash and PR and hurtling headlong from one thing to the other. They call it “shock and awe” but that’s just another word for chaos. And people are tired of it.
It’s been a rough six years since the pandemic. People were severely traumatized and Biden suffered from the hangover. Too many people thought that Trump would magically restore us to the time before it happened and instead he’s made it worse.
THAT is what’s happening in our society. It isn’t just the economy although that’s key. It’s the fact that we just keep getting battered, over and over and people are starting realize who is at fault for most of it. It’s not just the last six years. It’s the last decade — ever since that moment when Orange Julius Caesar came down that escalator and took a wrecking ball to America.