So Trump and Republicans Are STILL More Popular than Clinton and Dems

1) You can’t make meaningful comparisons between Clinton and Trump anymore. One has retired to private life, the other is currently the president. They are no longer competing candidates. People who have been recently elected President always receive a boost in the polls (this also applies to the Vice President). Trump has one of the lowest approval ratings of any U.S. president at this stage of his term (45% approval versus 49% disapproval). It should be noted that Obama currently enjoys a higher approval rating than either Clinton or Trump.

2) There is no significant difference in the approval ratings between Republicans and Democrats. If one takes an average of recent polls, Republicans have a 37% approval rating and 50% disapproval rating (-13%), while the Democrats have a 38% approval rating and a 49% disapproval rating (-11%). Both of the major political parties remain unpopular.

3) As for the U.S. Congress, it has only a 17% approval rating and a 64% disapproval rating. It remains very unpopular. It should be noted, however, that the approval ratings by local constituents of their local Congressman and 2 U.S. Senators tend to be much higher than the approval ratings of either the major political parties or the U.S. Congress. For this reason, Trump doesn’t have as much leverage over Republicans in the U.S. Congress as you have claimed. Their local approval ratings are undoubtedly as high as Trump’s approval ratings, if not higher.

4) “Work on his most important promises a better healthcare bill (still possible, the current one is in trouble) and a better economy.” Neither Trump nor the Republicans will ever pass a health care bill that will improve on the health care system that we already have. You’re level of naivety about this is astonishing! Nor will they improve the economy by decreasing the level of income inequality in the U.S. So far, they have successfully damaged the U.S. economy by attacking immigrants – this has decreased tourism in the United States and it has discouraged business investments from abroad. Sooner or later, the Trump and Republicans will lower taxes for the rich and provide them with additional financial benefits so they can suck the economy dry while creating another financial bubble that will collapse. There are already serious warnings signs that this will happen.

5) The war of words between Trump and the mainstream media is a non-stop battle. I fully expect it to continue for the rest of Trump’s term. In these battles, the mainstream media are usually right and Trump is usually wrong. For example, Trump’s claim that immigrants are responsible for an increase in the crime rate is a total falsehood. The statistics clearly indicate that immigrants to the U.S. are less likely to commit crime than native born U.S. citizens. Trump claims that Obama ordered an illegal wiretap of his phones at Trump tower, and there is no evidence to support this. Trump claims that he won the presidential election by the largest margin of electoral votes than any U.S. president during the past 30 years. This is pure rubbish.

6) With or without the mainstream media, it will be very difficult to change people’s opinions about politics and it will be difficult for the U.S. government to get anything done. This is because the U.S. population is currently highly polarized, politically speaking. Not only are there sharp divisions between Democrats and Republicans, there are also major divisions within the 2 major parties. Everyone has hunkered down in their respective encampments, making the U.S. increasingly difficult to govern.

My information from recent polls:

http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster

@ultra

I wouldn’t give the MSM much of an edge over Trump in honesty. During the campaign, they took pretty much every Clinton talking point and amplified it — Trump called Mexicans rapists (he didn’t), Trump mocked reporter with disability (he didn’t), Trump called on Putin to hack Clinton’s email servers (he didn’t). And they didn’t stop after he was elected — gag order on the EPA (essentially identical to one Obama issued at the start of his first term), crippling the State Department by massive firing (normal turnover of political appointees).

And as for making claims for which there is no evidence, witness the entire Russophobic foaming pig manure explosion (https://limitedhangoutblog.com/2017/01/20/donald-trump-and-the-continuing-bush-obama-legacy/), even to the point of just making stuff up (e.g. Russia hacks VT electric grid).

Oh, and if you really believe that Trump’s approval rating is just fine, you clearly don’t know much about historical context. As ultra pointed out, Trump has one of the lowest approval ratings in history for this point in his term. At this point in their terms, George W Bush and Barack Obama both had approval ratings higher than 70%–Bush’s following a very contentious election.

Trump is just barely treading water at this point.

I find these comparative approval rating analyses nowadays reveal more about the people who make arguments based on them than about the political situation.

Did Trump ever “lose the media” that his supporters watch/listen to?

If not, then I doubt negative press matters all that much.

I’m no longer paying attention to YKW (You Know Who). I now see it for what it is — a yuuuuge distraction meant to divert our attention. The words, the rhetoric, are also a distraction and pretty much meaningless otherwise. The Mainstream and Alternative Media play their part in this shit parade. The only reason I look their way is to gauge the extent of the distracting ruse.

Pay attention to the Gorilla. What’s the Gorilla? It’s what’s being done legislatively, judicially and via executive order. Focus on the actions and not the rhetorical drama.

This video is instructive.

Bananas

Re Pence, it is easy to have lower negatives than your boss because you are not the one in charge and, despite being a religious conservative nutcase, you still look like the adult in comparison to your boss.

Re Clinton, she always had high negatives and her blowing an election a ham sandwich could have won simply increase those.

Re Trump, he has no discipline. Someone said he was a thirteen year old trapped in a 70 year old man’s body. That sums him up. What he has going for him is that a lot of people are still in benefit of the doubt, give him some time mode, and he has the craptastic Democrats who still are acting like they can beat something with nothing and continue to doubledown on identity politics. It’s going to be a rough four years because at some point people will expect to see positive results from his policies impacting their lives. Nahgonnahappen, because his policies are hardline conservative crap. And people will eventually tire of his adolescent anticks.

Re the media, they will continue to discredit themselves. There is a surreal competition between them and Trump as to which is more embarrassing. For example, this morning Savannah Guthrie reported on Today not about how stupid and intrusive the CIA was in its cyber-spying and how negligent it was in its command, control and oversight of these activities, not that the code is apparently out there on the net, but that the FBI was going after whoever leaked material about this monumental cockup to wikileaks. Guthrie continued the media’s propaganda line that it was those damned Rooskies who were behind it, citing wikileaks “well-known” and completely evidence free connections to the Kremlin.

I mean it’s like they are all on drugs. Trump could criticize Obama seven ways to Sunday on substantive issues because Obama was a dreadful President, but instead he goes off on this stupid, weird tangent about wiretapping Trump Towers, leaving all his partisans to try to come up with weak, twisted defenses which compound the damage by discrediting themselves along with Trump. Meanwhile the media tsk, tsks about how lame this all is in their “we are the adults” kind of way, and immediately go off in turn about the Rooskies are coming, the Rooskies are coming. Look under your beds, because they could be hiding there. Stupid, stupid, everywhere, nor any thought to think.

For example, pay extremely close attention to this highly strategic appointment. He, and those he represents, will oversee a tremendous resource grab by the already fabulously wealthy oligarchs. You won’t read or see much about it in the press, but it will be happening while the press, like Pavlov’s Dog, reacts to YKW’s wild, insane Twitter rants.

Remember the slogan, “a chicken in every pot?”

It’s been replaced. It now reads, “a pipeline through every family room — if you’re fortunate enough to have a family room.”

Is That A Dagger I See Before Me?

Trump is flouting every known convention of civilized presidenting. He’s breaking most of the big, economic promises he made, keeping the religious ones. Most politicians break some of both (e.g. hope and change for Obama). When his big promises don’t pan out, the media circus will continue to be the focus.

This is a short list. It’s not terribly complicated, because we talk now in bad/good. Much of Congress has been busy working on no. 4 below. They did not spend much time on the healthcare plan, it’s almost identical to what they were proposing last year.

Broken promises:
1. Moderate, non-interventionist policies overseas – boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria and now Kuwait; and a 10% military budget increase. This is a no-brainer for Trump. We ALL love the marines and our killing toys.
2. World’s Greatest Healthcare Plan of 2017 ( yes, that’s its official title!), not.

Promises bigger than Trump, which matter most:
3. Jobs. No data yet, we need about six months for the data to start to stick, but this is very much dependent on the trajectory of the economy for a longer business cycle. We’re close to the end of the latest 6-8 year business/bubble cycle. 30% of fossil fuel companies are predicted to go bankrupt this year, if prices do not rise. I don’t think the picture will be better in six months, probably worse.
4. Public infrastructure and services. Watch this closely, but I think Trump will be relying on states and municipalities being forced to privatize public infrastructure and services (no federal monies for education, roads, bridges, everything, and it’s already happening with Medicare in the WGHP of 2017). I don’t think he will need much federal money. Barn sales will become popular, a la Chicago and the parking authority.
5. Trade agreement abrogations, partially kept. TTP and partially NAFTA, but not TISA, which is worse and mostly under the radar. I strongly feel that Trump’s noise on this is mostly religious, not real. He’s exporting his own services business, big-time (China).

Kept, or soon to be kept, promises:
6. Immigration. This, for Trump and his base, is religious. For the opposition, this has become religious. None of this is the result of a rational discussion about economic impacts. He has no idea about how to do this to actually help the economy, nor does he care. Nor does his base care.
7. Massive reductions in the federal government, almost across the board, except in the military. This is also religious.
8. Entitlements. This is religious and very dangerous for him, because he did not say a lot about these. They are Republican tenets of faith. Medicare cuts are already in place in the WGHP of 2017. Social security will be heavily privatized in the next two years. It will be the next big wave of opposition, after immigration. Opposition exhaustion will set in, and it will become the new normal.
9. Abortion. Religious.
10. To continue to act and perform exactly like he did during the campaign. Exactly. Chaos is his friend.

My prediction – 50% turnout in the 2018 midterms, with a highly energized opposition, and a flip in the Senate. Gerrymandering will hold the House. The rural base will have lost considerable energy, even with all of the religious tantrums. Religious fervor is fickle.

And they\’re off!!! Already. \”Hit the ground running,\” Grandma used to say.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke Proposes Opening 73 Million Acres Of Gulf Coast Waters To Oil Drilling

The 45,000 jobs will be focused on creating another five, maybe ten Deep Water Horizon events within the next decade turning the Gulf of Mexico into a toxic, dead, denuded sea of sadistic sobriety.

And that\’s just the Gulf of Mexico. Think of what they & the Russians, in partnership, have in store for the ice-free Arctic and soon to be Antarctic. There is so much opportunity, it\’ll make your head swim, since there will be no more fish, if your head can swim.

brian: “Why does every left leaning rag conflate the legal and illegal immigrants.” That’s strange, it seems to be the Right that does that. Nativists consider all immigration to be illegal, except of course for their great-grandparents. Trump’s proposed office to monitor crime by “immigrants” doesn’t specify legal or illegal, thereby doing the same conflation you’re accusing the left of doing.

Do you have any evidence that illegal immigrants commit more crimes than legal ones? I can’t find any, and as the person who made the claim, the burden of proof lies on you.

@ Arthur

I would not argue too strenuously that Americans are NOT morons, but that is really beside the point if we are to believe our own propaganda and founding documents, isn’t it?

I thought Plato had a good idea with the philosopher kings, but we chose to define ourselves as believing in being subject to the consent of the governed as our highest value for giving legitimacy to a government.

It’s the blatant contradictions that I cannot tolerate. It’s not really about Trump per se, as should be obvious from the fact that the world has gotten to be totally fucked up even under Democrat administrations, hasn’t it?

For the record, I am a lot more aligned with the left than I will ever be with the right, but I believe in common sense and honesty more than ideology or team politics.

@Ducan

Does it matter if illegal aliens commit less crime than other groups? Even the claim they commit less crime is suspect because we only know anything by the number that are caught.

Is taking the estimate of lower crime in this group as fact a good reason to not deport 800,000 known criminals?

You do bring up a good point about monitoring crime committed by legal aliens who should be stripped of their immigration/residency privilege and also deported if they are criminals. They have more legal protections so that task will be more expensive and time consuming.

@mandos,
i have a better idea, capital punishment, 1-strike you’re out. if one is not a contributor/ giver to the nation-state collective, what rationale justifies the cost of punishment/ housing a parasite/ taker? the religion of unfounded belief in sanctity of [human] life. (incidentally, i’m all for belief in sanctify of life, as long as we — humanoids, the highest life form — apply it across the board to the entities of cells below us. i.e., not spraying of pesticides, not squishing a spider trekking across our kitchen floor…, not participating in hunting season.)

@ Arthur

Well, morons may be the majority now, but we still claim devotion to the consent of the governed-otherwise, where would YOU find the legitimacy of any other kind of governing principle?

Besides, where would we be without our morons? More specifically, where would the moron Duncan find a place?

@ Moron Duncan

Obama did not win by a majority. Clinton did not win by a majority.

Reagan did. Nixon did.

Now go drown yourself.

Illegals have to right to be in the country and thus I have no sympathy for them. Mexico is not in a civil war, and there is no need to flee.

Hell its more dangerous to live in the US than it is to live in Syria. And Syria is in a full fledged civil war turned proxy war.

In absolute terms, US cops kill more people in a month than British Police have in 97 years.

The US has the highest rate and absolute terms of incarceration.

The US also has a disturbing number of child marriages.

Toddlers kill more Americans each year than terrorists do.

You think we could solve these problems before lecturing others.

“And keep an eye on Pence” correct Ian;

Fellow Indiana Republicans describe Pence as a “dirty backstabber…climber…religious nutjob…extreme neoconservative”

And don’t forget Pence’s role in eliminating Flynn who was Trump’s eyes into the National Security Apparatus. This literally blinded Trump just as the National Security Apparatus was attacking Trump using it’s media minions.

Flynn’s elimination was based solely on Pence’s story of an interrogation where Pence had the transcript of the call he took while in Costa Rica, Pence didn’t tell Flynn and then claimed [publicly to the press] that Flynn omitted details of a conversation that was over four weeks previous. On that alone; it’s clear Pence is as bad as his fellow Republican in Indiana related in vain.

Additionally, Pence got his man placed over at CIA, Pompeo is loyal only to Pence. Trump now has to depend almost entirely on Pence/Pence-apparatchiks for his intel.

I think Trump’s time is short if he doesn’t eliminate Pence/Pompeo.

@Highrpm?

1-strike you’re out. if one is not a contributor/ giver to the nation-state collective

Wouldn’t that mean we’d have to off all of Wall Street too, plus the surveillance state apparatchiks, the prison state, and much of the military too? Hmm, you may have a point.

I just have to ask if the site owner is okay with racist bullshit like this being posted here:

https://www.ianwelsh.net/so-trump-and-republicans-are-still-more-popular-than-clinton-and-dems/#comment-86560

on undocumented immigrants and crime, i checked into Politifact, assuming they might have done some digging. this is a long piece, with various stats from various places, and i’m pasting in this section so folks don’t just race to the bottom: “our decision” or however it goes.

“It’s also worth noting that in fiscal year 2014 [wd here: obama admin], Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported just under 178,000 illegal immigrants convicted of a crime, about 56 percent of all deportations. This is similar to previous years. So in Trump’s defense is the fact that there might be, at any given point, more than 100,000 immigrants in the United States convicted of a crime.

The fact that many immigrants are detained for immigration violations awaiting deportation — as opposed to committing some other type of crime — makes incarceration statistics hard to evaluate, said Mary Waters, a sociology professor at Harvard University. The GAO study found that immigration violations were the most frequent offense leading to detention, followed by drug and traffic violations.

We also wanted to note that every expert we polled said there is a consensus among scholars that undocumented immigrants are not more likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens. They sent quite a few studies our way. (If you’re curious, the May 2014 issue of Criminology and Public Policy has a good roundup of the latest research.)

http://bit.ly/1JK2dbL

the last link didn’t seem to be anything but a general page. that shown, i’d say that many undocumented immigrants from the south are coming to the US exactly because they are fleeing US policies and de facto polices: Nafta, the drug cartel murders that originate in the amerikans’ vast need for drugs, and trade guns for them, the U made coups in honduras and nicarauga, and others i can’t name at the moment.

but incarcerating brown people not carrying green cards is huge business, (ask amerika’s tuffest sheriff joe arpaio) and may have a lot to do w/ sessions reversing O’s pledge to let private prison contracts expire. note: i did dig up the fact in my recent diary on the subject that his EO didn’t include ICE prisons. but private prison contracts include filling some percentage of the ‘beds’, even when they’re space blankets in dog cages.

beyond that, incarceration has more ways to profit than i’d ever thunk through, and more ugly conditions than one can imagine. often death traps.

Now . . . IF commenter NR was talking about another comment on this thread, the proper course would be to copy-paste the text of that comment into NRs own comment to make it clear that NRs comment was addressed specifically to the specific comment specifically copy-pasted into the body of NR’s own comment.

As NR’s comment now stands, it merely directly fingers and targets Ian Welsh’s post, because it links literally and specifically to Ian Welsh’s post. If NR wants me to understand NR’s comment as being targeted to something different than the actual target which NR literally and specifically links to in NR’s comment, then NR can try commenting again by copy-pasting whatever NR thought NR wanted to be the target of NR’s comment.

If not, then I stand by my comment above as being the first reasonable response to anyone threatening a “Site Owner” about a Post. Given the ongoing Intelligence Community slow-coup against the Trump Administration, such suspicion and caution of apparently extortionate blackmailing threatining omments is only prudent.

“As NR’s comment now stands, it merely directly fingers and targets Ian Welsh’s post, because it links literally and specifically to Ian Welsh’s post.”

No, it links directly to the comment that was spewing racist garbage. Specifically, Ann Thomsen’s comment here:

https://www.ianwelsh.net/so-trump-and-republicans-are-still-more-popular-than-clinton-and-dems/#comment-86560

@ different clue March 9, 2017

WTF are you going on about DC? The commenter NR has linked directly to an obnoxious and racist comment and not as you claim to Ian’s posting, the commenter has asked if Ian as site owner considers such a comment acceptable.

It’s a perfectly reasonable question and an entirely reasonable response to a revolting piece of racist shitbaggery, get off your high horse and cool it with the overheated conspiracising.

@ The Stephen Miller Band: yes, agreed on your second comment. but one thing i’d correct on your initial respoe to me is this from wsws.org:

“The drug epidemic affects all ages, genders and races. The overdose rate for the 55–64 age group has gone up nearly five-fold, while the 45-54 age group had the highest rate of overdoses overall.
Whites had the highest rate of overdose deaths of any ethnicity, more than double the combined death rate for blacks and Latinos. The overdose death rate for whites, which was lower than that of blacks in 1999, has more than tripled since then.

What is behind the shocking and tragic growth in drug overdoses?
The drug epidemic has been concentrated in former coal mining regions such as Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee, along with so-called “rust-belt” states such as Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania. These areas of the country have been hardest hit by decades of deindustrialization, mass layoffs and wage-cutting, beginning in the late 1970s and continuing ever since.”

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/25/pers-f25.html

part II of my prisons diary was on “drugs”, because of this from beauregard:

“Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday restated his opposition to marijuana use and offered an ominous warning about state-level marijuana legalization efforts, suggesting that such policies would open states to “violence,” as well as potential repercussions from the federal government.”

decriminalization of drugs of all sort, not just cannabis would end ‘the violence’ in a tic. addiction could be treated as a medical issue, not a criminal one. but you’re right: the phony war of drugs is only too profitable.

now i’m sure there’s still a healthy black market for cannabis in states that approved recreational cannabis, but mainly if the state and local taxes were made far too high, as in our sleepy little western town.

readers might enjoy ellen brown’s 2016 ‘June 24, 2016 ‘The War on Weed is Winding Down, But Will Monsanto Emerge the Winner?’

two thirds of the way down, she gets to the heading ‘Competitor or Attractive New Market for the Pharmaceutical Industry?’, a fascinating compendium of cannabis benefits.

http://bit.ly/2mME8vt

Scanning the web a few minutes ago I came across a story about a pro Trump rally in Arizona which called for the killing of liberals. Really the particular state doesn’t matter. I’ve been to Arizona a number of times. It’s a wonderful place full of history and probably no more screwed up than any place else. I live in Chicago. Go south fifty miles and one will find SOME places that are at home in Alabama. That reality is everywhere. My point is that as I watch the unfolding situation I am more and more convinced that this can end only in violence on a massive scale. The only question is when. . .not if.

You could be right. Everything is at fever pitch today. All the ‘progressive’ sites have fascism right around the corner. But as Mr. Welsh stated in a post long ago if the progressives really think that’s right around the corner they should either be stocking up on guns or getting ready to leave the country. Well, maybe. In any event, I found this story on AlterNet. To be sure, AlterNet can often go over the top, but it’s worth a look.

Pretty good analysis here:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/king-democratic-party-doesn-unpopular-article-1.2993659

“KING: The Democratic Party seems to have no earthly idea why it is so damn unpopular ”
“The Democratic Party is deeply unpopular – period. It’s a fact. Don’t look away. Don’t call me a Bernie Bro. It’s a problem that must be seriously addressed. Not a day goes by when I don’t have people reach out to me and ask if it would be worth it to start a credible alternative to what the Democrats are offering. Most people, I believe, would also be open to a brand new way of business for the Democratic Party, but core leaders seem hell bent on doing the same old crap.”

“Virtually every progressive grassroots movement in America right now is fueled by people outside of the Democratic Party establishment and this is a huge reason why the party is so outrageously unpopular.”

“Huge grassroots movements, made up of millions and millions of people, are fueling the fight for a $15 minimum wage, fighting back against fossil fuels and the Dakota Access Pipeline, fighting to end fracking, fighting to remove lobbyist money from politics, fighting to end senseless wars and international violence, fighting for universal healthcare, fighting for the legalization of marijuana, fighting for free college tuition, fighting against systems of mass incarceration, and so much more. But mainstream Democrats aren’t really a central part of any of those battles, and, to be clear, each of those issues have deep networks, energized volunteers, and serious donors, but corporate Democrats virtually ignore them.”

“Recently, I’ve asked the crowds where I am speaking two key questions about the Democratic Party. The response that I get is always the same – mass laughter or audible frustration.

The first question is, “If I asked you, in just a few sentences, to sum up what specific policies the Democratic Party stands for, what would you say?”
People have no genuine idea. They know some things the party stands against, but it’s genuinely hard to be sure of what they stand for.”

“The other question is, “What exactly is the strategy of the Democratic Party to take back the government from conservatives across the country?”
That one always gets the most laughs. Nobody has any idea. Not once has somebody stood up and said, “Hey, I know the strategy.” Hell, I don’t know it. I don’t think one exists. Whatever the strategy was this past election, it didn’t work either. And again, I don’t just mean in the presidential election. Democrats lost all over the place in national, state, and local elections.”

What are the Democrats FOR? More of the same and harder!