Step One in fighting against Donald Trump this time
As we continue to grapple with this startling new reality that we’re facing, the same question keeps surfacing: where to begin? The other day I talked about some of the mistakes we made the last time we were forced to resist a Trump regime. Today I want to talk about something we got right last time, because we need to make it Step One this time around.
One thing we’ve constantly seen with modern U.S. Presidents is that their ability to govern and get their way is based on their approval rating more than anything else. It may feel like just a number on paper. But in reality it’s what gives a President political capital with the American public.
Trump’s ability to carry out this or that corrupt initiative will be based almost entirely on how popular or unpopular he is with the American people on any given day. He may have Congress, he may have the courts, but at the end of the day both those entities will be more afraid to go along with Trump’s antics if he’s stuck with a very low approval rating.
We saw this in action last time around. Trump entered office with a historically low approval rating for an incoming President, already down to the forties, and it crippled him politically right out of the gate. The media saw that the public was quickly turning against Trump, and so the media started feasting on him. Each of his initiatives was covered as a scandal instead of as a political plank, and it sank a lot of what he was trying to do.
The one thing we couldn’t quite do last time was drive Trump’s approval rating all the way below the magical 30% number. If we’d have gotten him down into the twenties, that would have been the only story about him, and it would have meant the end of his agenda. We came close, but we were only able to drive Trump down into the low thirties, before he settled in and ended up around 40% for the long haul. It was just enough for him to limp along with his agenda.
This time around we need to take this even further. We need to quickly make the mainstream American public – yes the same dummies who just tepidly voted for him and/or stayed home on election day – embarrassed by the fact that Trump won. We need to convince these folks to have immediate buyer’s remorse. We need Trump’s approval rating to already be down in the thirties by the time he takes office, and down into the twenties sometime in early 2025. That way the entire story ends up being about how unpopular and untenable Trump is, and neither he nor his allies have any room to drive anything else.
So how do we make this happen? We focus on the things about Trump that are the most embarrassing. We focus on how deep into dementia he is. We keep asking why he’s all but disappeared since being declared the winner. We focus on the extremist and absurd nature of his initial cabinet picks. He’s really floating a Fox News host as Secretary of Defense? That sounds so bad to the average American, it’s something we can use against him. You get the idea of how this works.
So let’s bury Donald Trump’s presidency under the weight of his own low approval rating before it even begins. It’s the best leverage that we have. If we’re going to fight this guy, this is how we do it.
