Greetings VGC!
Whelp it's now official: according to even the most conservative polling aggregator, Trump's job approval rating is back upside-down. The honeymoon's officially over. For anyone who doesn't know what I mean, as I explained here a few weeks ago, newly-elected American presidents tend to enjoy a kind of honeymoon period where they're popular at the start of their new terms because people don't know better yet, and typically the goodwill lasts a good while. Sometimes years. Even Joe Biden polled in net positive territory on average until September of his first year in office. Trump, by contrast, has burned through all of his post-election political capital inside of two months. Only 46 more of those to go!
What's the public liking and not about the new administration just under two months in? The most recent Daily Mail survey is instructive. They did the word bubble thing with people's responses to queries about what Trump's biggest achievements and screw-ups have been so far. The words people most commonly used to describe the new administration's biggest achievements to date were "border" and "immigration", followed by "illegal" and "immigrants", all of which are descriptors of the crackdown on illegal immigration, which one concedes has pretty much completely vanquished the entire phenomenon. Meanwhile, the word people most commonly used to describe the new administration's biggest screw-up to date by a wide margin was "tariff", followed by "Musk", "firing", "federal", (all terms describing the DOGE wrecking operation) and "Ukraine". I don't think I need to explain any of those things in further detail to this highly attentive community.
To add something you might now already know though, the leaders of all those countries Trump has been accosting lately, ranging from Canada's previously struggling governing Liberal Party to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, are all enjoying a surge of directly consequent rally-around-the-flag patriotic popularity right now. (See the links.) The only party involved who isn't benefiting from a patriotic surge in popularity right now is, ironically, our jingoistic president, who's poll numbers are headed in the opposite direction and are now in fact upside-down. Everyone else is proud of their leaders. Everyone but us. And the specific reason why we're not proud of ours is because our increasingly broad-ranging and extreme trade war against the world is causing American consumers to worry about the direction of the economy and the cost of living. American consumer confidence sank this month to a two-year low specifically over fear of what the economic consequences of our rapidly escalating trade wars might be.
You can feel the culture continuing to shift. Congressional Republicans are avoiding town halls for fear of their constituents. X is the platform getting taken down by cyber-attacks these days. There's a wave of national boycotts happening. Dystopian literature is selling like discounted eggs from Canada. Liberal elites (the only people who ever bought them in the first place) are selling their Teslas now that they're fascist vehicles. There's a MAJOR nationwide protest against everything from DOGE and Trump in general to our slide oligarchy being jointly organized by a wide range of groups slated for April 5th that even I'm actually thinking of participating in. Andrew Tate's rescue from his rape and pimping charges by the Trump administration is proving mildly controversial with conservatives and seriously controversial with the larger public. (I wouldn't be much of a feminist if I neglected to mention it, would I?) In short, the resistance is back and it's starting to almost make me feel like there is hope for the future. Almost.
Last edited by Jaicee - 23 hours ago
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