He doesn’t have time to read polls. He’s the President of the United States and needs to focus his precious time on attacking actors and anyone else that makes fun of his idiocy.
Normalization complete? And from reading some of the posts even on this forum, probably.
The fact that Obama’s approval was ever as low as Trump’s is pretty depressing anyway.
Well, the trains ran on time under you-know-who.*
*Yeah, it’s a myth, I know…
**edit: first twitter response was the same thing. Unoriginal minds think alike?
Not really surprising to me, because he was very up front and honest with identifying the illness and prescribing the medicine to get us out of the mess he was handed. And it took some time for the recovery to begin in earnest.
The electorate wants bread and circuses, not tough lessons and hard work to make our country better.
Only according to Rasmussen, which leans heavily republican.
Check this and you can look at Gallup’s historical polling for tons of past presidents
At this point, Obama’s approval was 49%, and Trump’s is 39%.
For disapproval, Obama was at 46% vs Trump’s 56%.
538 compares a few and holy crap the closest comparison is to Ronnie Raygun & Gerald Ford to this point.
That’s incorrect. It’s “been screwed over”
Nah.
That’s what they SAY.
But the real fear is that they themselves have fucked up. That their current lot in life is due to their own decisions.
Which in many cases it is.
That kind of fear cuts right to the core. Acknowledging it as remorse hurts real bad. To accept that one’s own mistakes have led to a bad result, and cannot be changed, is one of the most painful things that we ever deal with as adult humans. Seeing other people succeed, and wondering what could have been if we made different choices, gnaws at our souls.
It’s so much easier to push those feelings down, and pretend that it’s all someone else’s fault.
But such a path just continues along the road to hell. Because while it’s painful to accept responsibility for our mistakes, such acceptance at least allows us to start making better decisions. We can’t change the past, but we can make the future better.
But there are many people who would rather take the opiate of self delusion, than the bitter draught of responsibility. But that reality still lies low, below the surface, gnawing away at them.
This is compounded by several thing though. One is that, fundamentally, there is a vast gulf in the margins between poor and rich. It’s the reason the statistics for income for a college grad from the bottom quintile are matched by those of a high school dropout from the top. If you are poor, you need to make the right choice, at every turn, from grade school on, to have a chance at a decent outcome. If, at any time, you screw up? You’re done. Screw up the SAT’s? Screw up in choosing a school? Screw up by not finding all the financial aid since you don’t have someone with the skills to guide you through? Welcome to dead end jobsville.
If you are rich, drop out of school for being a delinquent slacker, have an arrest for drug possession in your teens, generally fuck around and be an irresponsible trust fund kid? You will still have a seemingly endless supply of chances, comparatively. Your parents drinking buddies might have a position for you while you ‘get your act together’.
And people recognize this. They may not be able to accurately diagnose it, or recognize the reasons. But they can implicitly feel how there are people out there for whom the rules they’ve had to follow do not apply. That 20 year old little shit of a nephew of the boss got promoted to a low level manager position and is technically your boss, despite being two weeks out of rehab for a DUI, while you are barely scraping by despite having worked your butt off for 20 years at the company.
They can feel this, yet here they support the biggest emblem of this exact system.
The episode of This American Life Three Miles touches on these things (though doesn’t explicitly call out this phenomenon)
Listen to it and you can hear it in the background, in the words unsaid. The story of the brilliant girl, Melanie I believe, who comes so close, but makes one bad choice. She gets discouraged when her seemingly best chance falls just short, and instead of pushing on gives up. Gives up because she expends so much energy for a chance, to get nothing, that the thought of trying again seems insurmountable. So she gives up.
It’s a mistake, and one she recognizes. But that one mistake makes it so much harder to get another chance. It’s basically a decade to get to a point where even trying again seems possible both emotionally and economically. But she is stuck between those times. Where if you were rich? Another chance would be much easier to get. YOu have support systems, economic systems, all in place to make the gathering of opportunities frictionless.
This is Kid Rock.
Yeah.
Heh, well…
But, seriously, This American Life’s show I linked is a great listen on just how hard and exhausting it is for someone poor, and in economically disadvantaged position, to get the chances some take for granted.
Nice try, but ‘mysterious ways’ always wins.
Following evangelical logic, they would literally approve Satan for President if he was anti-abortion.
They wouldn’t even need that if he was registered GOP and didn’t actually say he was pro-choice.
Really think you are wrong here. It’s all about locus of control. The people we are talking about think their American Dream was stolen from them and given to blacks or women or some other group. Nothing is their fault. Someone else is to blame. And I think that ties in to why they would vote for a scumbag like Trump, because just as they think someone else is responsible for all their problems, some outside force has to be the thing to fix it. They can’t do anything to change their circumstance, because they didn’t cause it. But a guy like Trump, who isn’t part of the old boys network in Washington, he can give back what was stolen from them.