Donald Trump’s numbers are collapsing
“It ain’t good.” Those words come from CNN’s Harry Enten, who seemed shocked to see Donald Trump’s approval ratings plunging, plunging, plunging to the bottom of the barrel—well — not quite the bottom, as I believe there’s still space to fall even further.
Enten said he was shocked to see Trump fail so spectacularly on “bread-and-butter issues.” Other pundits have also expressed shock. As gratified as this writer is to see the media finally talking about Trump the way he should’ve been talked about months and years before, I do have a somewhat sardonic view of the question.
Why the surprise? I know that on television, Donald Trump has been portrayed as some incredible cartoonish monster whose numbers are not capable of falling. But have these people forgotten that this is exactly what happened last time he was in office?
Look, the American people are fickle. I hate to say that because I wish they weren’t, or we would’ve won the 2024 election, but people’s memories tend to fade quickly. There has been so much scientific research that shows that long-term memory softens considerably with the passage of time.
And in politics, it moves at light-years speed. What’s essential in one second could be yesterday’s news in another. There isn’t another industry in the world like politics. Remember how, after Trump left office the first time, the disapproval rating was pretty low, especially when the January 6 committee started to unravel their findings?
People forget that time softens memories, and when people look back on things, what was evil and cruel might look very different three years later. Call it temporary amnesia, if you will. So back to today. It’s not just Trump doing poorly on one issue. It’s that he’s doing poorly on every single possible issue one could think of.
Seriously, try to put yourself in the mind of a Republican. (I’m asking for a lot here!) But what is he excelling at? If you look at all the kitchen table issues, from foreign policy to healthcare and Medicare and Medicaid, he’s screwing up everything right and left. The refrigerators have been open too long, and everything has gone stale. So, it stands to reason that this is how the cookie crumbles. For Trump, it’s a stale cookie, a rather disgusting cookie actually pieces falling all around him as his approval goes lower and lower.
