Donald Trump has a whole new problem
Donald Trump has a lot of problems right now, to say the least. He’s fending off too many congressional and criminal investigations to count. His foreign policy agenda has failed. His domestic policy agenda no longer exists. His kids are being targeted by prosecutors. You name it, everything is going wrong for Trump. But now he has a larger problem, which speaks directly to how much longer he can hold off before he’s ousted.
I always caution Palmer Report readers never to treat one new poll as if it were the only poll. For instance the media keeps focusing on Donald Trump’s top outlier approval rating poll one week, then his bottom outlier approval rating poll the next week, dishonestly getting people worked up over it all, even as his approval rating has largely remained steady for the past year. But last night we got a very different kind of poll, and it tells us where this is headed.
The new Quinnipiac poll tells us that fifty percent of Americans believe Michael Cohen over Donald Trump, while only thirty-five percent of Americans believe Trump over Cohen, with the rest the people unsure. Again, this is just one poll, but it’s the first of its kind, so it’s all we have to work with. Because the margin here is so large, unless this poll is off by a whopping fifteen points, we now know that more Americans believe Cohen than Trump. That’s remarkable, considering that everyone knows Cohen is a liar and a criminal.
What’s more, this is based solely on first impressions of Michael Cohen’s testimony, and the smattering of physical evidence he brought with him. This is before more influential Trump people like Allen Weisselberg take the stand, and bring far more evidence. This is before Robert Mueller reveals the incriminating evidence that Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Don McGahn, Steve Bannon, and other cooperators have provided against Trump.
Donald Trump is already down to just one-third of the country holding him in higher esteem than liar and criminal Michael Cohen. That number will keep dropping as more and better witnesses publicly testify in the coming days and weeks. Trump’s base is perhaps 15% to 20% of the country. They may never give up on him, but that doesn’t matter. He can’t sustain his presidency with just his base. He needs those people in the middle who make up the rest of his approval rating.
Forget about Donald Trump’s approval rating for now, as that’s the kind of poll where the people in the middle are still trying to give a sitting president the benefit of the doubt until Trump’s crimes are comprehensively proven to them. Instead, pay attention to this new poll that says Trump is already in sub-Cohen territory when it comes to trustworthiness. That tells us the people in the middle think Trump is guilty, and it’s a predictor of what they’re likely to say in approval rating polls once all the evidence of Trump’s crimes has been laid out for them in the coming weeks.
