Yes, at this moment the Moron-in-Chief is doing his daily recitation of how wonderful he is, liberally larded with data like numbers of respirators and face masks as well as the usual insincere encomiums. (He just praised the White House as being “one of the most beautiful buildings in the world.”) His modus operandus is to minimize any bad news, covering it with a blanket of adjectives like “tremendous,” “amazing,” and “wonderful.” The quote at the top came from him.
And yet. . . and yet. . a new Gallup Poll shows that, as of March 22, Trump has the highest approval ratings of his presidency:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump may be enjoying a small rally in public support as the nation faces the COVID-19 pandemic. Forty-nine percent of U.S. adults, up from 44% earlier this month, approve of the job Trump is doing as president. Trump also had 49% job approval ratings — the best of his presidency — in late January and early February around the time of the Senate impeachment trial that resulted in his acquittal.
Trump’s response to the novel coronavirus pandemic may be behind his higher overall approval rating. Americans give the president generally positive reviews for his handling of the situation, with 60% approving and 38% disapproving. Ninety-four percent of Republicans, 60% of independents and 27% of Democrats approve of his response.
How can that be?
Hearing his voice, is like nails on a blackboard. Can they PLEASE stop these daily briefings by the President and replace him with somebody with less logorrhea?
h/t: Lou, Muffy
It’s enough to turn any kind, generous person into seething misanthrope.
Well he has not shot anyone on 5th avenue, but it appears that around Easter he will start a process that could kill thousands of Americans, if not a couple of million. But, even after his followers flock to churches for Easter, and start dying after that, and indirectly killing many of the rest of us, they will still not blame him.
Worse yet, they won’t blame themselves either! As the pastor in Louisiana said, after bussing people in from five different parishes, “If people get COVID-19, how do we know it is Church and not WalMart?”
I wonder how many of his parishioners are on the People of Walmart website ?
What is it that the Donald thinks he can do come Easter Sunday to resurrect the American economy, anyway?
Trump hasn’t issued any nationwide federal orders shutting down any businesses; he’s left the hard choices to state and local governments. Accordingly, he has no de jure authority (that I know of anyway) to countermand the “shelter in place” and “essential businesses only” orders issued by governors and mayors. About the most he could do is order all federal offices to open at full strength (or with as much strength as they can muster under the circumstances). But that will merely put the health and lives of federal workers in jeopardy; it won’t kick-start the US economy.
I mean, I suppose Trump could nationalize the New York state militia and order them to mount their bayonets and go menace the bronze charging bull sculpture at the corner of Broadway in the Financial District. But NY governor Andrew Como controls public transportation and the police and fire departments (not to mention the NY Acqueduct and ConEd). Under those circumstances — and given that Easter Day, April 12th, is likely to be the peak of the coronavirus curve for NYC — I doubt the “Masters of the Universe” are going to heed Trump’s call to go running bowlegged down to their offices down on Wall Street.
My theory as to why Trump is seeing a slight increase in approval ratings is the salesmanship is having an effect that comports in some way with the reality many individuals are subjectively seeing. The risk of COVID-19 is not high for any specific individual at the moment, so it’s quite easy for people away from places like NYC and other city centers to see this as a vast overblown reaction to a problem that’s just subtracting from Trump’s greatness; i.e. there’s a plausible world they can see where he is being treated unfairly and the rest of the world is suffering from mass hysteria.
However, as Governor Cuomo warned yesterday, wait a few weeks, a lot of America will look like NYC, struggling to contain the spread and free enough space in hospitals. I fear it could be even worse as we still have 50%+ of the population in the country under no restrictions. My prediction is FL is going to quickly become another epicenter, as there is a large elderly population and no shortage of people who think social distancing is ridiculous and simply aren’t participating.
Look to the big cities first, Atlanta is out of ICU beds. Note it is not ventilators that are the limiting factor there. I have worked in over a dozen hospitals (of all flavors and multiple regions) and they all had storage rooms packed with old ventilators. I suspect New York City is different due to the premium put on space in such a large and confined city.
As being demonstrated in Atlanta, I would worry more about ICU bed availability which requires a) the physical space, b) monitoring equipment, c) adequate staffing which includes physicians, nurses, and respiratory therapists (at a minimum). And medical staff of ICU’s are typically already stretched so more patients and isolation requirements for staff will make tough situations untenable as far as staffing goes.
I agree Florida should soon follow with Miami (shout out to Disney for doing the right thing) being the sentinel, New Orleans had Mardi Gras in late February so I would expect that city to start having trouble soon as well.
the White House quote is no mistake. It’s like a magic spell to the followers – the White House itself a relic in the American civil religion.
I made a comment on another page that essentially concluded he will win in November, and I don’t see anything counter to that.
Trump is dominating the airwaves. Where the hell is Biden ? He needs to get busy and stand up to the bullshit.
How safe is Democratic control of the House in the next election?
I think it is a rally around the flag effect, common in most national emergencies. In this case it is rally around the flake.
+1! After all, he hasn’t fired Dr. Fauci yet. My guess because he doesn’t have *another* doc in line to hire; and that he will blame it *all* on Fauci at a later date.
Why mess with a successful strategy?
I think a part of tRumps increase in approval comes from the sense of national crisis – let’s all band together as one nation. The president just gets sucked into the gestalt by proximity. Another part is that for millions of Americans Washington, politics, the president, are far from their notice until something big happens. At that point, they have no memory of the causes of calamity, even if he’s standing right in front of them. He’s on TV, he’s moving around, waving his arms, saying something…it’s better than sitting alone and worrying by yourself. Such is the human condition.
The BBC doesn’t usually do opinion pieces quite as strongly worded as its New York correspondent’s take on Trump and the Coronavirus response: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52012049
And of course people are following misguided advice: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/52012242
Yes, it is very disturbing that Trump’s popularity has risen lately. One reason for this, I think, is that there is a certain segment of the population that pays little attention to the news and are likely to rally around the president in a time of crisis. Thus, they are quite susceptible to the wiles of American’s greater drifter. Yet, these people are allowed to vote. Such is the price for having a democracy. This situation seems to prove also that there is nothing that can break Trump’s hold on his cult.
Still, perhaps we should not despair. At the Atlantic site, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, argues that the Democratic chances are still quite good. His basic argument: “The United States is in revolt against Donald Trump, and the likely Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, already holds a daunting lead over Trump in the battleground states that will decide the 2020 election.” He then goes into a detailed explanation of why he believes this. I hope only that Greenberg is right. I’m still plenty nervous as the pandemic grows worse every day.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/the-democrats-dont-understand-their-own-strength/608611/
I read that article earlier as well. I think its arguments do have some sound reasoning. There is also the fact that 2016 stands out due to the shock of Trump winning, but had 100,000 people in 3 states voted the other way, we wouldn’t be in this situation. Sites like FiveThirtyEight had a Trump win well within the realm of possibility and thus far there is nothing to indicate that the standard polling and data analysis is somehow fundamentally broken in the age of Trump. Democrats have made massive gains in the midterms in 2018 as expected. It seems that the zeitgeist, which Trump has no doubt had a hand in creating, is giving Trump much more credit than he deserves, painting him as nearly unstoppable force that will be impossible to defeat. Of course, Trump could get re-elected but I think the lesson of 2016 simply reinforces the fact that humans are horrible at predictions, and only slightly better when we avoid emotion and use the data.
In 2016 the zeitgeist was that Trump could not win, and so critical numbers of Americans sat out the election and woke up to a big surprise.
By 2020 the zeitgeist may emerge, despite recent polls, that Trump cannot lose. Once again critical numbers of Americans could stay home.
“critical numbers of Americans sat out the election and woke up to a big surprise.”
That’s always been my theory, and the numbers support it. It shouldn’t happen next time.
More on that here https://www.forbes.com/sites/omribenshahar/2016/11/17/the-non-voters-who-decided-the-election-trump-won-because-of-lower-democratic-turnout/
Much of the low turnout in 2016 was due to the media claiming Hillary couldn’t lose. It will not be repeated in 2020.
Oh my god
Had those 100,00 people in those three swing states voted the other way, the Republicans would’ve probably undergone another electoral “autopsy,” the way they did in 2012 when Mitt Romney lost with 1.1% more of the popular vote than Trump got in 2016.
Republicans have lost the popular vote in six of the last seven elections. Donald Trump appears to have no path to winning 50%+ of the popular vote — unless some combination of Republican voter suppression and/or massively dispiriting right-wing propaganda and/or foreign hacking of our voting systems significantly decrease Democratic voter turnout. Fifty-percent-plus has been the benchmark for incumbent presidents to win reelection in US presidential elections, except in races where there’s been a significant third-party candidate (such as a George Wallace or Ross Perot).
A crisis makes possible many more creative vote suppression methods. I’m sure their think tanks are working on strategies.
These are good points. If the election were imminent as in the coming weeks, we might be in real trouble. Voters on the lower end of the economic spectrum are less likely to imbue informed about methods such as voting by mail and it is easy to envision a combination of the usual shenanigans that create long lines at polling places where Democrats are the majority combined with rhetoric that you should avoid the polling places (which would actually have some merit, but certainly would be a boon for Trump)..
I believe the intelegencia thinks Trump is doing a horrible job because they hate Trump but I think all western governments have been incompetent. I just listened to a podcast where a Frenchman was excoriating Macron’s lack of response. Italy, France, Spain, etc have had as bad a response as the US. It was a difficult problem and none of the western government prepared or responded properly.
I am not saying Trump has been good (he hasn’t) but that Macron, Johnson, Sanchez, Conte have been no better despite having the advantage of leading smaller, more centralized governments.
Unfortunately, the blame game is mostly politics. I hear Cuomo blame Trump for NY crisis as though Cuomo has no blame in leading the state with the worst outbreak.
“I think all western governments have been incompetent’
Take a look at Germany, Norway and Iceland, especially a couple of weeks from now. With less certainty, I say compare US to Canada when we get a good idea of the correct number of actual cases.
It’s still early, but you’re almost certainly dead wrong, with the emphasis on the word “dead”. and not just wrong on the quote above.
Unquestionably all governments are having trouble handling the crisis, but almost none of them are being led by a completely incompetent psychopath. They are at least doing there best with advice from experts. tRump is more likely to contradict them based on some notion about what makes him look good.
There was an article in The Atlantic this morning, which I can’t find now, explaining the spike in approval. It was written by an experienced pollster.
He explained that people cling to the security of the known during a crisis, and gave the example of Bush right after 9/11. Bush’s popularity and approval went to 90%, but only briefly.
The pollster further explained that such a spike is pretty temporary. He said that either the crisis gets resolved, and people go back to focusing on whatever they disliked in the first place, or the crisis gets worse, and people turn on the leader.
What he said made a lot of sense, and he gave other examples in addition to 9/11.
I hope he’s right.
L
See Comment #9.
A lot of opinions are like that, and one can see why. W. Bush got re-elected in the climate of a war on terrorism, and the frequent and mysterious “code orange” warnings that regularly pre-empted all daily news because the State Department said there was “chatter” about some sort of impeding terrorist attack. I don’t think there was any more chatter than usual. And they knew that.
The New Yorker had a good cartoon showing how Trump would use a face mask. It went over his eyes, while his mouth stayed open.
The Dark Ages have returned.
“Moron-in-Chief”
Moron – idiot – liar – these terms are far too kind at this point*. Clearly, unequivocally, the president’s decisions have made the country he is sworn to protect far far less safe, and illustrate how problems are not taken seriously.
*not a critique of the writing of this post…. why is the asterisk superscripted by default? That’s interesting…*^*^****hmmm*
I note that cnn (Cockup Nitwit News, not as bad as Fox) has me on the edge of my seat: Drumpf has claimed that 1+1= 3, but most scientists, well really all mathematicians, are insisting that they think 1+1=2.
So this is a very important case of two battling sides on an issue that will keep people from changing the channel, and lowering the rates for commercials by drug companies and ‘jade egg up the vagina’ multinational corporations. So we must interview people from both sides, we must take a poll–will Drumpf now be able to get elected by his speeches about 1 million deaths plus 1 million deaths is really only 3 deaths (and even they are in no way his fault)?
It’s pretty hard for people in the rest of the world, very gravely and negatively affected by that man and his regime, his political party, and those hordes of utterly ignorant stupid xenophobic moron voters, hard not to wish for the best for Usians, but modulo it being at least bad enough to finally get through the thick skulls of that last horde. And maybe that means they need to be hoping for 10 or 20 million deaths in the US.
Anything less and welcome to another four years of what will probably cause billions of premature deaths due to climate change in the next 4 or 5 generations, all round the world.
Can’t Fauci stand up and tell him literally to stop giving false and very dangerous advice? Can’t the news channels call a spade a spade, and stop giving time for a monster to cause at least tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths?
Do we need an Edward R Murrow? Do you think it would help? How fast do you think he would be called a liar or worse?
IIRC, in his day, Murrow did a great deal of good, especially with respect to McCarthyism. Perhaps everywhere needs many of them.
Right now, Drumpf gets Faux News to cover his TV rallies thoroughly and in real time, and with their softball questions sometimes. That forces CNN (not my cnn) and MSNBC to also cover it in real time, or they lose viewers. So, for commercial reasons, they cannot have a couple of hour delay, and then insert experts debunking all of his nonsense, immediately after, modulo the delay, that dangerous nonsense is spouted.
So it is difficult. But they could sacrifice a few rather useless ‘stars’ and put on something like that soon after and in addition to earlier showing him sucking millions in with his conman act. Somebody useless like Blitz Wolfperson, or whatever his name is, just disappearing for a few months, to make way for some ‘Murrows’ in such a debunking program, ones who have strong science supporting attitudes, would be welcome.
Calling truthtellers liars, and liars truthtellers, is going to happen anyway, especially in a former slave state full of xenophobic superstitious ignorami, with many people sucked into Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Actually, one death would do it. Mr tRump is not immune to Covid-19.
The irony would be satisfying, too.
cr
Trump is a fucking man-child. All he can do is brag about any meager achievements (most of which are made up and off topic in the first place), shirk all responsibility, and show his red-assed resentment anytime any reporter has the temerity to ask him a question that casts him in an unflattering light.
He’s an unfit-for-office buffoon.
I’m going with “comic book villain”
I would rather have a comic book villain as President than Trump. Say what you like about Lex Luthor, but he’s more intelligent than Donald J. Cheeto-face!
You mean modus operandi? (The second word is in the genitive case.)
As others have pointed out, presidents’ approval seems to go up in times of crisis. You can see how Bush 43’s approval rating when up after 9/11 on this page https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/ (scroll down a bit to see previous presidents ratings charts). Bush went from low 50s before 9/11 to high 80s shortly after 9/11. (Thank Spaghetti Monster Trump didn’t get that kind of ratings bump.)
“..presidents’ approval seems to go up in times of crisis”
I hope you are right if as some others do, you’re thinking they’ll go down again.
But the level of incompetence and harm here by Drumpf seems likely so bad that some analogies would be:
Pearl Harbour happens, and the USians rally around FDR, after all it’s a crisis, despite being after he has announced that US will surrender to Japan, etc. etc.
or
9/11 happens, and the USians rally around Bush, after all it’s a crisis, despite being after he has announced he’ll mollify Al Quaeda, e.g. asking whether if he maybe goes off to Saudi Arabia and kisses the ass of the King every 6 months or so, please, please would that be enough to get you to stop hurting us??
It is beyond pathetic.
Judging by polls, it’s looking like Trump’s approval increase won’t translate into more votes. Biden still leads by 7 to 10 points.
As Trump’s approval goes up in time of crisis, Biden’s lead remains steady.
Listening to Trump is like listening to a sixth grader giving a book report on a book he has not read.
+1
Excellent analogy.
I think Trump’s talent is for tapping in to popular sentiment and knowing which way the wind is blowing. His stance on the coronavirus is something like a bet – but a bet that might pay off for him. Cases seem to be decreasing in Italy. I do think it’s worth noting that countries with very different levels of social isolation actually seem to be seeing cases peak and then drop off on approximately the same timeline (possibly – more waves are always possible.) If – and it’s still a big if, but if – this is the case, I think it would indicate that the virus spreads asymptomatically to a much larger percentage of the population than we know about and burns itself out in about two months in places where it strikes.
So say this is the case and Trump intuited this correctly. In a few months, coronavirus will have ripped through like a natural disaster. Horrific as this is, it’s still the case that, as ChrisBuckley pointed out, this may feel pretty abstract for most people. We hear about terrible natural disasters all the time and think “Oh, how sad” or even “I’ll send a donation”, but the life of a person in Idaho is not particularly influenced or defined by a terrible hurricane in Florida.
What will not be at all abstract to people, however, is the economic devastation. Everyone will be feeling that. There will be something of a class divide in that those perceived as “the elite” will feel it far less. Populists who were already inclined to scorn “elite experts” on things like global warming will be very much predisposed to see this as yet another example of the dangers of allowing those they consider ‘ivory tower’ to dictate to people in the real world. This is a recipe for very angry “us vs. them” thinking, which tends to work well in elections.
If – again, if – this crisis is not as bad as it could have been, I think it will be pretty easy to spin it as a case of elite mismanagement (to be clear, I do not agree – I think when dealing with unknowns you can only do the best you can do, with limited information, and we have every reason to err on the side of caution for now). It has everything that tends to drive libertarians crazy. Dictates driven by scientists. Big government intervention. Loss of freedom. By placing himself where he is now – on the side of “Well I wanted to end these restrictions and get us back to work” I think that Trump is, again, taking a bet to that effect, and his base, for the most part, seem to be taking it with him. If they are wrong, and the crisis is worse than feared, the more left-leaning posture of supporting shut downs will seem savvy and prescient. If, on the other hand, coronavirus causes horrific suffering for individuals but, for the country as a whole, fewer deaths than the flu, then we will never, ever, eeeeever hear the end of it.
That’s a very thoughtful analysis, and I think your scenario is likely. Thanks to the heroic efforts of many people, the pandemic is likely to be less bad than the worst “civilization-ending” doomsday scenarios, and Republicans will say “See, we told you so”. People will forget Trump’s delays and lies and incompetence, and never stop to think that the number of dead (whatever it turns out to be) could have been orders of magnitude smaller if a decent leader had been running the show.
FiveThirtyEight had a good article on this, though I can’t locate it in my browsing history at the moment,talking about the difficultly people in general have in weighing individual risk against collective risk, which jibes with my original comment in thread 3.
I think another factor here is the general lack of awareness in society as to the differences between linear and exponential growth. Naturally, our idiot-in-chief plays on this when he makes stupid statements about cars killing more people daily than COVID-19 is. Well, that was true up until 3 days ago when we hit 100 deaths in a day in the U.S., then quickly progressed to more than 200. If car crashes grew exponentially, we’d have a big problem. One thing is for sure, Trump will likely drop that talking point like a bad habit going forward.
This goes back to that classic brainteaser used to introduce kids to exponents, “Would you rather have a million dollars or receive 1 penny on day 1, 2 on day 2, 4 on day 3 and so on for a full month?” Sadly, it seems most people make it into adulthood without a firm grasp on these principles…society is not reckoning with what doubling the caseload every 2-3 days means.
You asked for predictions recently, and mine look accurate, alas. Americans will rally behind the leader in a crisis. It gives Trump a stage to look like a strong man who “does something”, and he’ll use resentment by labelling it “chinese virus”, which all goes in his favour.
Do Americans want to swap him out for Joe Biden? I doubt that. Americans are highly conservative and don’t like experiments. Biden was also too slow and nobody thinks he could be on top of the situation (as best as possible). He rather made news with his absence.
I think a majority of women, even Republican women, dislike Trump, and will not vote for him, and would prefer Biden by far. So there is hope.
The data does not support this. The vast majority of Republicans of both sexes strongly support Trump, as far as I have seen.
There’s some hope
https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/447308-trumps-giant-gender-gap-62-percent-of-women-say-they-are
Sorry, I C&P the wrong link. Here’s the correct one: https://www.shondaland.com/act/news-politics/a30644928/are-republican-women-going-strong-or-going-extinct/
I am afraid that the perceived existential threat of coronavirus will trigger those susceptible to turn to the available authoritarian:
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/07/10/when-and-why-nationalism-beats-globalism/
Biden needs to come up with (and communicate) a clear plan for how he will deal with the virus after it fades this summer and has a resurgence with the other viruses during cold and flu season. So far all he has done is criticize which is not going to cut it.
Bill Clinton communicated clearly (if that clarity included his vision is debatable) and won. Barack Obama had a vision, communicated it, and won. Biden needs to communicate soon or will condemn us to 4 more years.
(Which would not be surprising given that the last president we elected to his first term who was over 60 years of age was Harry Truman…)
Unfortunately, Biden isn’t even in the same league as Bill Clinton and Obama.
Or Truman.
I hope this is indeed a temporary “rallying around the Leader” in times of Crisis. I must admit it is mind-blowing that the rallying is around a leader who so clearly bungled this crisis. He kept downplaying it for the better part of six weeks, the ‘NSC Playbook for Pandemics’ was completely neglected, etc.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-national-security-council-149285
The US was estimated to be the best prepared country on the world to respond to a pandemic,
https://www.statista.com/chart/19790/index-scores-by-level-of-preparation-to-respond-to-an-epidemic/
Now it looks like that is not going to be, and we all know why.
Weak minded people love a good strongman. Be it an authoritarian president or an invisible sky-daddy, stupid people feel comforted by the notion that there is someone in absolute control. Even if the controller is destructively insane and a threat to everything that actually matters.
I’m not sure they’re weak or stupid as much as apathetically lazy.
“I’m not sure they’re weak or stupid as much as apathetically lazy.”
How’s that relevant to Trump’s approval rating?
“It’s hard not to be happy with the job we’re doing”
If “we” means the American people, I have to agree; if it means the Administration, not so much; if it’s the royal “we,” fuggetaboutit.
He was talking about his administration, as I recall.
“How can that be?” Meaning how can anyone have a different perception than me?
I don’t worry so much about the logorrhea. I’m more concerned about the liarrhea. 🙁