Day: August 17, 2017
Trump continues to sink
Trump is hitting new lows so fast it is hard to keep track. But let’s be clear what he has done lately:
- given a boost to neo-Nazis, one of whom murdered a peaceful protester and injured 19 others;
- defended anti-Semites and white supremacists;
- encouraged racists to continue their protests against taking down Confederate statues;
- spoken out to defend people who rebelled against the US Government in order to protect slavery;
- admired a false anecdote about an American general murdering Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood.
He has also dissed the Republican Senate majority leader and several other Republican members of Congress, while floating a rumor that he will pardon an Arizona sheriff who was convicted of refusing to obey a court order to stop abusing immigrants. Senator Corker, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had a few choice words on Trump today:
Trump’s approval rating has dropped, but only to 40% or so among registered voters. That is from polling before most of the above items happened. He clearly believes that what he is doing will solidify his base and maybe attract some additional support. We’ll see if that turns out to be correct. His numbers among Republicans have started to slip, but they are still around 74%.
Non-Americans will wonder what all this is about. In a word: it’s about race. White working class voters made Trump’s campaign succeed. They are now hesitating to abandon their hero, who promised good jobs, implying that black people, immigrants, and trade agreements had illicitly deprived them of their white privileges. This map of hate groups in the US gives an idea of how pervasive racial divisions (note they are not particularly concentrated in the south):
Trump is figuring that he can husband and strengthen his white working class support, despite the fact that most of the job loss was due to technology, a factor he never mentions.
But there is a problem. Despite his mighty brags, he is not producing more jobs than his predecessor. Brian Klaas puts it succintly:
Brian KlaasVerified account @brianklaas
The stock market is up since Trump’s election, but there is growing realization that he will not be able to deliver much of the regulatory and tax relief he promised and that the Trump Administration is confused at best and chaotic at worst. The smart money is betting on a big correction.
Hillary Clinton couldn’t get the votes she needed in the Midwest to win in the Electoral College, but she was certainly prescient about Donald Trump, whom she knew well:
So, you may well ask, when will this end? It will, but there is still no indication of when the Congressional Republicans will take on the responsibility for bringing this president down.
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