Right now, Donald Trump has the highest approval rating he's ever had as president, and he's still just below 50%, the lowest of any president this early in his term — except for himself, right after taking office in 2017. That hasn't stopped him and his lackeys from insisting that he has an unprecedented mandate to enact a radical agenda, based on what they ludicrously call a landslide victory. In reality, he won the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points, falling just short of a majority, and his 312 electoral votes are historically unimpressive. Compare that to real landslides, such as Ronald Reagan's victory in 1984, when he won 49 states with a popular-vote margin of 18 points, and the claim becomes embarrassing. That's just how they roll.
According to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, "45% of Americans approve of Trump's performance as president," which is down a couple of points from their Inauguration Day poll, while those who disapproved increased from 39% to 46%. When it comes to Trump's early policy moves, a majority disapproves of almost all of them. These range from the substantive to the ridiculous: Only 25% approved of renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America," while 70% disapproved; pardoning the Jan. 6 defendants has 62% disapproval; and ending birthright citizenship gets thumbs-down from 59% of respondents. Trump's tariff plans also fall well short of majority support, as do his withdrawal from the Paris climate accords and his orders to end DEI and non-discrimination programs within the federal government.
The one issue in that entire poll that receives majority support is "downsizing the federal government," but it's reasonable to assume that a majority do not believe that abruptly freezing all funding for medical research, children's health programs or veterans' care with zero notice, as Trump and his Project 2025 acolytes tried to do this week, is the way to do it.
Perhaps the most striking result in that survey is the massive unpopularity of Trump's pardons for the Jan. 6 rioters. Only hardcore MAGA true believers appear to support that decision, which tells you that Trump's belief that Americans at large see the violent attack that day as justified is completely wrong-headed. (Even Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. one of Trump's most loyal supporters, thinks that was a mistake.)
Trump does not seem concerned about that. Over the weekend, Trump appeared at a rally in Las Vegas with Stewart Rhodes, the former head of the Oath Keepers, whose 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy was just commuted. According to a recording obtained by CBS News, Rhodes said a few days after the Jan. 6 riot that "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 all the Jan. 6 prisoners were patriots who love their country. Meanwhile, one man he just pardoned was killed by police in a shootout days after being released, another is wanted or fsoliciting a minor and another now faces trial on charges of pedophilia and possession of child pornography. It's 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 people did that day, whatever Donald Trump wants to claim about it now.
Trump is so driven to "prove" that everyone should believe him, rather than their lying eyes, that he has appointed Ed Martin, an organizer of the Jan. 6 "Stop the Steal" gathering, as interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. At a rally the day before the Capitol attack, Martin 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 never believed things had gotten "out of hand." After the crowd had already breached the building and was engaged in a violent battle with police, Martin tweeted: "Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy."
He's been a big part of the Patriot Freedom Project, advocating for the Jan. 6 defendants and holding fundraisers for them. If there is anyone with a greater conflict of interest regarding these cases, I can't imagine who that would be. Martin has already instigated one of those Trumpian "investigations of the investigation" to review what he calls the "great failures" of prosecutors in using a charge that was later thrown out by the Supreme Court, even though virtually all the lower-court judges who heard those cases had upheld it. He has disbanded the Justice Department's Jan. 6 unit and moved to dismiss all pending cases.
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The New York Times reports that Acting Attorney General James McHenry has "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 to "faithfully implement" anyone's political agenda — but apparently those rules have changed. Trump sees the DOJ as his personal law firm, and I guess that makes sense, since he's staffing it with defense lawyers from his criminal, impeachment and civil trials.
Now we have FBI director-designate Kash Patel, who will face confirmation hearings this week as he prepares to take over leadership of federal law enforcement and do 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's 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 several former Republican national security officials. Revelations seem to emerge on a daily basis about Patel's malfeasance in his 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" Jan. 6 as a patriotic protest rather than a violent insurrection. He spread lies that the FBI had instigated the riot and pushed the bogus Ray Epps conspiracy theory. He even produced that Jan. 6 "prison choir" rendition of the national anthem. It's hard to think of anyone worse or less qualified to be FBI director.
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All of this is happening in the shadow of Trump's repeated flouting of the law, from his executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship to the unauthorized firing of almost all independent inspectors general to his refusal to fund programs authorized by Congress, which is their job, not his. His brazen lawlessness has already exceeded most people's expectations or even imagination, and he's just getting started.
The American people do not support any of this, it appears, and any they will almost certainly like it less and less as all this unfolds. Trump's twisted psychological need to believe that he won by a landslide and is therefore vindicated in his ludicrous and hateful lies about 2020 has given him a monumental case of hubris. He'll do a lot of damage before he's finished — but he will never get the popular approbation he craves, now or in the future.
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