Just 100 days into his second term, the president is approaching “January 6 was three days ago” levels of bad polling. CNN’s 100-days poll dropped on Sunday, and it demonstrates just how unpopular a fascist dictatorship hell-bent on tanking the economy so a tiny cadre of ghouls can get slightly richer while operating a blazingly illegal “deportation” crackdown can really be. Well, some of the way there, at least.
The poll showed a 59 percent disapproval rating for Trump’s overall handling of the presidency, against 41 percent approval. He hit that 59 percent mark once before in CNN’s poll way back in 2017, and it was only eclipsed at 61 percent on the last poll of his first term — conducted January 9 to 14 in 2021, as the glass was still being swept up at the Capitol. Another poll released this weekend, from the Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos, offered similar results, with Trump’s approval dropping from 45 percent in February to 39 percent in April, and his disapproval topping out at 55 percent.
There is undoubtedly a floor to his disapproval — the true believers out there will either refuse to believe any bad things are happening or will actually think the bad things are good. But plenty of the country don’t qualify — they just voted on the most successful lies of the past half century, that the GOP is the Good At Economy Party and that Trump is a Good Businessman, and don’t pay enough attention to follow every authoritarian twist and turn in the news. But they’re starting to hear about it all; as it trickles down and out, his numbers drop. As his numbers drop, the odds that some small chunk of in-power Republicans might try to rein him in go up, or, barring that, that a midterm landslide is in the cards.
Trump’s numbers on pretty much everything are in free fall. On his handling of the economy — only 39 percent approve and 61 percent disapprove, from 44 and 56 percent, respectively, in February, per CNN’s poll. On immigration — 45 and 54 percent, down from 51 and 48 percent a couple of months ago. On foreign affairs — 39 and 60 percent, down slightly from 42 and 58 percent. In the Post’s poll, 64 percent think he is “going too far” in trying to expand executive power; only 30 percent think his attempts to close federal agencies is being “handled about right.”
There literally isn’t anything happening in Trump’s administration that more people like today than they did at its start. Republicans in general have long enjoyed a strange imbalance where explaining much of their policy platform in simple, factual terms to someone who hadn’t heard about it is more likely to spur disbelief than disapproval; Trump’s outright assault on government and fundamental rights will give that theory its biggest test.
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