President Failure is not popular. That goes without saying.
His approval ratings are tanking fast, so much so that his minions are resorting online to claims that polls are always way off. Which is yet another vibe that’s not true.
A quick aside, if you want to make a bet with me that the 2024 national polling average for the last election was way off, outside the typical margin of error of +/- 3 points, and the bet is being hit on the head by a baseball bat, let’s just I played a lot of baseball in my time and I am taking practice swings.
Anyhow, Donnie’s popularity is dropping faster than a loud fart during a wedding.
It’s hard not to see why. The Semi-Senient Rotting Carrot has been a tornado of incompetent chaos, causing a small portion of his electorate to wonder where the cheap eggs they were promised are, and independents are running away in droves. Particular groups that all the Very Smartest Minds of the Great American Discourse were insisting were now permanent Republican strongholds are also running away. What is bad news for Trump is the fact that this is all happening before the real storm gets here.
This Bluesky thread by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo lays it out:
It’s only getting much play in the trade/transport niche press. But pretty real product shortages beginning in mid-May or so are already locked in. They’re maybe a thousand miles out in the Pacific Ocean. Modern trade takes place in gargantuan container ships. There are very detailed records …
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) 2025-04-27T14:19:32.779Z
When people’s favorite items, or even necessary ones, are no longer available or at best more expensive, that will of course not go over well and may even jar people’s memories that Trump’s last year was not in fact a wonderful paradise of cheap stuff and prosperity. Along with causing a lot of pain, this should also give Democrats a huge opportunity.
In the very, very early days of the Trump 2.0 Dynasty, the Wisest of All Leaders in the Democratic Party were ignoring the base urging them to fight and instead were babbling about bipartisan solutions and Kitchen Issue Tables and pretty much sounding like Trump had won a huge landslide so they had to go along with him. In other words, instead of actually looking at what happened, they seemed to buy into Trump’s boasts and did the thing where they grossly misread the room (see muzzling Tim Walz during the campaign).
But now we have an opportunity, a big one, to not just stop some of the worst stuff that Trump is doing but also set up a blowout in the midterms. There is this affliction within the party to seem “reasoned” and fall back on old ideals of bipartisanship and dismiss people insisting on more fight as an overreaction. This, as I’ve said before, is yelling “WE DO NOT RUN IN THE HALLS” during a school shooting. I have no idea what is going on with the Michigan Dems, like Gretchen Whitmer and Elise Slotkin, saying things like people don’t understand the word “oligarchy” and going to the White House to meet Trump. Gavin Newsom has torched his political aspirations by believing the best reaction to all this was having far-right figures on his podcast so he could nod along with them. I am seeing Democrats still insisting that immigration is a losing issue, despite falling polls for Trump on immigration-specific questions (and again, what happened to the idea of convincing people to see your view?).
We should all be on Team Pritzker, who is one of the Democratic party voices encouraging a fight. Despite some of the more lazy, knee-jerk reactionaries in the DC media, this really is not a left-right divide, but more of an argument about leadership vs. submission. The latter have really, really misread the room while Pritzker, AOC, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Murphy have demonstrated an ability to understand the moment.
As far as how to go about the attack, one suggestion I dare make is that issues are not zero-sum. You can, you know, talk about how Trump and MAGAs are focused on hurting a very small percentage of Americans, trans people, while ignoring those very same egg prices that they were promising to lower. You really can talk about those beloved Kitchen Table Issues like the economy, while at the same time pointing out that Trump’s “policies” are stupid and cruel, whether it’s the economy or immigration.
In any event, America is facing quite a mess, and it’s all caused by Trump. This is going to make him even more unpopular. For Democrats, there is both a political opportunity and an opportunity to work to limit the suffering (like protect our social safety net), and there is no reason that they can’t do both.
The last word goes to Pearl Jam.
Another thing or three for newly-inspired Democrats and progressives: If you think there’s something that should be done but nobody’s doing it, you have permission to do it yourself. If someone is doing something you don’t want to do, at least stay out of their way. They may not be talking or appealing to you, and that’s okay.
If someone you know and trust is critical of what you’re doing or saying, engage with that person. Maybe they have an insight you don’t have, or maybe they don’t quite understand what you’re doing. No need to go eight shades of ballistic on each other. Discuss it calmly and rationally.
I go to our local county party meetings sometimes due to my volunteering with a local political action group and have noticed a change over the last year. They were extremely hostile to new ideas, operated on outdated perceptions, not willing to understand things like how new media works, very condescending, etc. “I have a lot of experience so I understand how things work” and blocking out everything else right now is like being a horseshoe maker of 40 years in 1930 insisting that horses are better transportation than autos, a combination of vested interest and behind the times.
Now, more than half of them are coming around and the rest are just angry, digging in their heels. This would be humorous if it wasn’t sadly ironic, but they are at the same time accusing people of being divisive and threatening party unity. And bipartisanship is under attack too, constant angry roars about “working with the other side” and of course the other side are monkeys throwing poo at the wall but to these folks oddly the poo-throwers are more reasoned than the people in their own party disagreeing with them.
Needless to say, this is being tolerated less and less in a college town given the attacks on research and higher ed (economic engines for the local economy), so they are getting more and more boxed in. And as is often the case despite perception, those disagreeing with these entrenched local party elites are trying to coax them and work with them, but it’s them who are refusing to. Just sort of revealing to watch unfold.