One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.
Two can be as bad as one’
It’s the loneliest number since the number one
Three Dog Night
The above lyrics say it all, don’t they? Mainly they say everything you need to know about what passes for song lyrics when you’re young and stoned. But when you’re older and wiser, numbers can make you think of other things than reaching for the Doritos. Things like this.
I think we may have found Trump’s floor
This is another sign of age and wisdom. Back in our youth, finding the floor wasn’t a very hard thing to do, hell after the third spliff and 2nd six pack, it was automatic. But finding the floor of Trump’s popularity has been a much more arduous task.Every time he sinks in the polls, we wonder if he has hit rock bottom.
Well, I think we’ve found it. It appears that it might well be 34%. I say that not only because it’s a nice low number, but because it was his popularity rating in two separate polls last week, as well as being the number of people who approve of his handling of North Korea. Obviously, there could be minor dips ahead, but I tend to think that this is probably as close as it gets to a concrete number, for a couple of simple reasons. One, he has been hovering between 34-38% for the last several cycles now, but 34% seems to be the bottom. And two, he has been fucking things up for 9 months now, he’s kind of a known commodity. Other than resigning, I don’t see anything he could do to raise his popularity (if even that did the trick), and if the outrages of the last 9 months haven’t turned people off, at this point pretty much nothing will. So I’m willing to go with 34%
Speaking of North Korea
Speaking of North Korea is something that the Tangerine Tantrum Machine should never do again. If in fact John Kelly’s job is to manage the information that Trump receives, then he should manage to tell His Lowness that North Korea blew itself up with one of its own nuclear tests, and Trump doesn’t have to worry anymore. Actually, I find the 34% approval rating for Trump’s handling of North Korea that I mentioned above to be surprising. Surprising simply because it’s too goddamn high! Think about it. According to the poll, one in three Americans are fine with Herr Gropinfuror starting a conflict by tweet that would kill hundreds of thousands in the first two hours, including tens of thousands of Americans, just as long as we look all tough and John Wayne and shit in doing it. Darwin may have proven that man evolved upwards from apes, but this poll proves that there are quite a few of us who are well along the path back down. We haven’t seen intellect like this since the Olduvai Gorge.
Trump’s NFL statistics
Ever since the orange Big Apple worm started his little pissing contest with a bunch of oversized jocks in their Mad Max outfits, talking heads have been saying what a winning distraction this is for Trump with his base. But polling doesn’t seem to bear this out. While a bare majority of Americans, 52% disagree with players taking a knee for the anthem, 57% object to Trump sticking his big, fat, bankruptcy loving nose into it in the first place.But this cooked up brouhaha has shown us one thing other than the fact that Jerry Jones needs a couple of paid NFL mastadons to get him back upright after he takes a knee. It teaches us that pundits don’t learn. Since Jones threats to bench players who participate in the protests, talking heads are huffing and puffing again about “1st amendment rights”. Sweet Jeebus, didn’t they learn anything from Hank Williams Jr.? The first amendment means that the government can’t stuff a sock in your blow hole, but your employer can sure as shit sanction you for spouting off like Moby Dick. Why is this so complicated?
“I can’t drive 55”. And neither can Trump for long
In post election breakdowns, while Trump was less popular than Ebola in towns with more than two stoplights, he did just fine in places where there’s a really good reason for taking your shoes off before you come in the house. Polling 30 days into Trump’s term showed that he enjoyed 55% popularity in red “rural” America. Trump knows it too, notice how he still prefers his rallies in places like Alabama, West Virginia, North Dakota and Iowa? But it is starting to appear that ‘down home common sense” isn’t just an urban legend. A recent poll showed that Trump’s popularity in rural American had dropped from 55% to 48%. That’s an average drop of 1% a month. While I don’t think that this signals a great democratic resurgence in the bible belt, it should be a promising sign for Senate incumbents like Heitkamp and Manchin, in what were considered highly vulnerable seats. And it may well also sound a warning alarm for GOP incumbents of depressed enthusiasm, especially in places where Bannon is planning on running Twilight Zone candidates against them in the primaries.
To read all of the numbers tripping so lightly from my fingertips, it might surprise you to learn that I was so terrible at math when I was a kid that I needed a TI calculator to store my home phone number on. Amazing how much smarter you get when you get older, and have to explain it to your kids when helping them with their homework, isn’t it?