Michael Gerson/WaPo:
The Trump presidency is not just unfolding, it is unraveling
“I am the least racist person ever to serve in office,” said the man who is increasingly bold in his use of racist tropes.
He joked again about being in office 10 or 14 years from now — appealing to people who find overturning the constitutional order a laugh riot.
“Mental health,” Trump went on. “Very important.” Hard to argue with that one.
When that gets repeated in multiple sources, people pick up on it:
NY Times:
Trump Acclaims Economy, but Voters Are Anxious Amid Recession Talk
Polling suggests that worries about the health of the economic expansion cross party lines.
Nearly three in five respondents to the survey said they were worried about the economy, regardless of whether they were personally struggling or doing well financially. That group cuts across party lines and encompasses a large group of voters who could collectively sink Mr. Trump’s re-election chances, including three in 10 Republicans and seven in 10 independents.
AP:
AP-NORC poll: 62% disapprove of how Trump’s handling his job
Just 36% of Americans approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president; 62% disapprove.
The numbers may be ugly for a first-term president facing reelection in 14 months, but they are remarkably consistent. Trump’s approval rating has never dipped below 32% or risen above 42% in AP-NORC polls since he took office.
David Lauter/LA Times:
Trump has remade the Republican Party, but at a price
Trump’s hold on the party’s voters has surprised and dismayed Republican elected officials who identify with the party’s traditional, business-oriented wing. Many of them initially believed they would be able to limit Trump on issues such astrade and immigration, only to discover that disagreeing with the president put their careers at risk.
Trump’s triumph, however, has come at the price of alienating a significant slice of the Republican electorate, the poll shows: Among Republicans, 12% said they would be unhappy to see him reelected.
The possibility of defections among Republicans is something Trump can ill afford: He won his election in 2016 by the slimmest of margins — roughly 80,000 votes in three key states out of some 130 million cast nationwide — and his policies have mobilized his opponents and driven away a large number of independent voters.
The poll illustrates the steep challenge that Trump faces in winning reelection: A majority of Americans eligible to vote would be unhappy if Trump were reelected, the survey finds. Of those polled, 54% said they would be unhappy, 29% happy, and 16% neither.
“Those are daunting numbers” for Trump, said Bob Shrum, the longtime Democratic strategist who is the USC center’s director.
Yair Rosenberg/WaPo:
Trump keeps pushing anti-Semitic stereotypes. But he thinks he’s praising Jews.
To Trump, the belief that Jews are foreign interlopers who use their wealth to serve their own clannish interests is not a negative — as it is for traditional anti-Semites — but rather a positive. He wants Jews to be his attorneys and manage his money, so that he, too, can be rich. He wants them in his political corner, so that he, too, can be powerful. He wants to buy politicians, just like they do. As a man who has always stood solely for his own naked self-interest, Trump does not see the anti-Semitic conception of the self-interested Jew as a complaint, but rather a compliment. He prioritizes his needs ahead of the national interest, and so he sees the idea that Jews might do the same with themselves or with Israel as entirely natural. He is the human embodiment of the Onion article “Affable anti-Semite Thinks The Jews Are Doing Super Job With The Media.”
This understanding also helps explain the most confusing aspect of Trump’s most recent anti-Semitic outburst. The president claimed that Democratic Jews are “disloyal” to Israel. But this is an inversion of the traditional dual loyalty trope, which charges that Jews are more loyal to their fellow Jews or Israel than to their home countries. Trump, by contrast, was arguing that Democratic Jews were insufficiently devoted to other Jews or to Israel — that they were not strong enough dual loyalists. In other words, he criticized American Jews for notconforming to the anti-Semitic stereotype. That’s because, as we’ve seen, he thinks such stereotypes are praiseworthy.
Monmouth:
POTENTIAL IMPEACHMENT IMPACT ON 2020
Trump’s overall job rating stands at 40% approve and 53% disapprove, which is similar to his 41% to 50% rating in June. Over the past 12 months, the president’s approval rating has ranged between 40% and 44% in Monmouth’s polling while his disapproval rating has ranged between 49% and 54%.The usual demographic clefts remain present – men are divided on the president’s job performance (49%approve and 43% disapprove) while women are decidedly negative (31% approve and 62% disapprove).White Americans without a college degree tend to approve of Trump (55% approve and 37% disapprove),while the reverse is true among white college graduates (38% approve and 57% disapprove).
“Donald Trump is not a popular president by most measures, but the appetite for impeachment remains low,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.
Just over a third (35%) of Americans feel that Trump should be impeached and compelled to leave the presidency while a clear majority (59%) disagree with this course of action.
TIME:
Low Wages, Sexual Harassment and Unreliable Tips. This Is Life in America’s Booming Service Industry
The decade-long economic expansion has been a boon to those at the top of the economic ladder. But it left millions of workers behind, particularly the 4.4 million workers who rely on tips to earn a living, fully two-thirds of them women. Even as wages have crept up–if slowly–in other sectors of the economy, the minimum wage for waitresses and other tipped workers hasn’t budged since 1991. Indeed, there is an entirely separate federal minimum wage for those who live on tips. It varies by state from as low as $2.13 (the federal tipped minimum wage) in 17 states including Texas, Nebraska and Virginia, up to $9.35 in Hawaii. In 36 states, the tipped minimum wage is under $5 an hour. Legally, employers are supposed to make up the difference when tips don’t get servers to the minimum wage, but some restaurants don’t track this closely and the law is rarely enforced.
Putting it all together, JV Last/Bulwark:
A Tale of Forests and Trees
In other words: The old saw about forests and trees is based on something real. Sometimes, knowing too many details means that you weight the details you know more heavily that the bigger underlying facts.
Which is more or less how I think about the 2020 election. The more you know, the more you can talk yourself into exotic theories about how, if the Dems do this, and Trump does that, and the economy is just right, and one cohort of voters in Michigan hangs tough, and New Hampshire flips, and the split electoral vote in Maine comes home, then Trump gets reelected.
And that’s all true! You can absolutely see how Donald Trump pulls off reelection. He has a path.
On the other hand, if you came down from Mars today and spent 10 minutes getting your arms around the 2020 election, the facts which would jump out at you are:
- In 2016 Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes.
- His approval rate has never been over 50 percent.
- For almost the entirety of his tenure his approval rate has moved between 39 percent and 46 percent.
- He trails all four of the potential Democratic nominees in match-up polling.
- He trails his most-likely opponent by double-digits.
And looking at these base facts without knowing all of the intricacies you’d think: “Trump is widely unpopular now and has been widely unpopular for the whole of his tenure and voters are already saying that they prefer other alternatives.”
Keep an eye on this brutal BuzzFeed story about K of C (my bold):
A Powerful Catholic Group Is Facing Allegations of Insurance Fraud
Today, however, McAtee is a witness for the plaintiffs in a massive new lawsuit that could shake one of America’s most powerful socially conservative groups to its core. The case is accusing the Knights of Columbus of “racketeering, fraud, deception, theft, and broken promises,” a complaint in US District Court for Colorado, which will begin hearing the case Monday, reads. …
The allegations — membership inflation, keeping phantom members on the books in order to appear more profitable — are very common in fraud cases, Chelsea Binns, the president of the New York chapter of certified fraud examiners, told BuzzFeed News, though she said she couldn’t give a judgement on this specific case.
“From my experience in the fraud world, what you see here is not uncommon when you have misaligned incentives. It’s really all about incentives,” Binns said….
“Between the [church’s sexual abuse scandal] and this, we just thought, where's the right in this anymore? It just doesn't make sense anymore,” the man, who asked not to be named as he is considering filing his own lawsuit, told BuzzFeed News. “It's all about money now, and not what we do, but how do we hide what we've done?”
All of the seven agreed that the Knights were not a lost cause, but said the organization’s leaders need to be held responsible for what is happening. The local Knights have to fight for what’s right they said, go against the Supreme if that’s what’s necessary.