As the news gets worse and worse for the nation, Donald Trump is finally, deservedly, getting some of the blame. Not nearly as much blame as he deserves, but at least he is not able to BS his way out of any blame, which seems to have been his specialty in life.
Yes, Trump has now been president for three-and-a-half years, and the country is far worse now than it was before he came in. In fairness, some of the ills which have befall the country did not originate with him, specifically. But he just made matters worse with his trademark arrogance mixed with sometimes stunning levels of ignorance. Finally, after decades of getting away with lies and utter nonsense throughout his life before taking the highest office in the land, and even years where, mostly, he was able to largely BS his way enough that he still maintained surprisingly strong support from a significant percentage of Americans, he is receiving considerable blame for the poor job that he has done since becoming president.
The Trump presidency has been marked with criminal behavior, and fittingly, there has been one scandal after another. From the emoluments clause violations that kept popping up because he failed to do as he promised he would, and separate himself from his businesses, to the Robert Mueller investigation, to the quid pro quo allegations that were basically proven to be true during his impeachment trial in Congress, to the seemingly countless scandals that ensued after this particular president said or did something that was stunningly stupid and/or racist and/or insensitive and/or ignorant, Trump kept getting away with everything. Part of his was his own legendary audacity of declaring himself totally and completely exonerated, or typically deflecting any and all criticisms of him as "fake news."
Sooner or later, with someone as incompetent as Trump in charge, however, things were bound to turn sour. And sure enough, things got bad quickly.
Ironically, it started right after perhaps the biggest con yet that he managed to get away with. After clearly being guilty of quid pro quo - even a prominent member of the Trump administration admitted that it qualified as quid pro quo, before telling us we need to get over it - Trump was riding as high in his presidency as at any prior point. He had gotten away with over three years of bad behavior and, frankly, stunning levels of incompetence. Fully 49 percent of Americans supported him, which is still both a stunning and extremely sad statement on the collective American mindset today. And just as he was riding that high, the first and probably biggest crisis of his administration came: the coronavirus pandemic.
It could have been a test, and he might have handled it better and come across in a more positive manner. But instead, he lied and tried to BS his way through the whole thing. He undermined it's significance, at one point infamously claiming that there were 15 confirmed cases, but that this number would soon go down to close to zero, and then congratulated himself on a job extremely well done. Except that it did not go down to close to zero, but went up. And up. And up. Before long, the United States had more confirmed cases than any other country in the world. Then, it started to have a lot more confirmed cases than any country in the world, by far, and it had more deaths, too. Not much later, we had far more confirmed cases, as well as far more deaths, than any country in the world, and it was not even close.
Trump could have minimized the damage, and began to take the crisis seriously. Instead, he doubled-down on it being not a big deal, claiming that the Democrats were using it as a hoax. His supporters apparently seemed to only hear the "hoax" part of that, and they began to view this whole thing as a hoax. When Trump began to flip flop on wearing masks, he seemed to make this a new part of his divisiveness, or what some are referring to as his "culture war" mentality. Trump supporters now take wearing the mask as participating in some kind of grand conspiracy. They go so far as to suggest that people wearing masks are either stupid and/or "sheeple," blindly accepting the lies that the "lamestream media" are pushing.
Yet, he did not learn an lessons. Nope, Trump just kept making idiotic remarks, to boot, digging his own grave in terms of presidential legacy. If there were still some halfway reasonable people who were not sure that he was as bad as so many people were suggesting, his own contradictory words and promises helped undo his own seriousness as any kind of an expert. From pushing strange strategies to cure the coronavirus, underscoring not only his lack of expertise, but his tendency to be a snakeoil salesman, to his claims that more testing was the reason that the numbers of confirmed cases kept increasing, Trump kept doing what he does best: opening his mouth and revealing just how little he resembles the "very stable genius" he keeps insisting that he is. Nor did he stop there, as he said that the coronavirus pandemic will “at some point ... going to sort of just disappear,” and later made the erroneous claim that “99 percent” of coronavirus cases are “totally harmless.”
Now, with well over three million confirmed cases of coronavirus within the country, and over 130,000 dead from it, new polls suggest that a vast majority of Americans disapprove of how President Trump is handling the pandemic. Two-thirds of Americans now believe that President Trump has handled the coronavirus pandemic poorly, according to the latest ABC-Ipsos polls.
How bad is that?
It's the highest level of dissatisfaction with the president's response to COVID-19 since the pandemic began.
Until now, Trump's approval rating had mainly hovered in the low to mid-40s. The previous iteration of the poll, conducted June 17-18, had his approval rating at 41 percent.
Furthermore:
The eight percent drop in Trump's approval rating can in part be attributed to his falling stock among independent voters. In the mid-June poll, the president's approval rating among independents was 40 percent; now it's at 29 percent. Conversely, his disapproval among the pivotal voting bloc went from 59 percent to 73 percent.
Support from Trump's own Republican base also diminished, with approval of the president's pandemic performance going from 90 percent to 78 percent.
The poll was conducted July 8-9, surveying 711 adults with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.
And the news on another aspect of Trump's presidency is not good, either. Many view Trump's mishandling of racial tensions in recent months equally poor and troubling:
The same percentage of respondents, 67 percent, also say they disapprove of “the way Donald Trump is handling race relations” amid protests against police brutality and racial injustice that began in late May after the killing of George Floyd. Just 32 percent of respondents say they approve of Trump’s handling of race relations.
Mount Rushmore of a “left-wing cultural revolution” that was “determined to tear down every statue, symbol and memory of our national heritage.”
If that many Americans now clearly view Trump's handling of these crises facing the country as poor and disapprove of his job, let us hope that finally, that translates to him being roundly defeated in the upcoming election in November. For too long, he has gotten away with his mastery of scam artists and cons on a surprisingly high number of people Let us hope, once and for all, that Trump is exposed as a con artist with no real answers for the country, and sent packing, his whole presidency transformed into mere bad memories for the country.
At some point, all of his nonsense should catch up with him, after all.
Here are the links to the two news articles used in writing this blog entry:
Poll shows Trump’s coronavirus approval at all-time low The president remains reluctant to acknowledge the disease’s threat as he keeps pushing to restart the U.S. economy. by Quint Forgey, 07/10/2020:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/10/trump-coronavirus-approval-rating-low-355894
Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Trump's handling of coronavirus: poll BY MARTY JOHNSON - 07/10/20 08:58 AM EDT:
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/506718-two-thirds-of-americans-disapprove-of-trumps-handling-of-coronavirus
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