February 20, 2017
The minor rally Trump is seeing at Gallup is real. From his low of 38%, he has gone up 4 days in a row and is now at 42%. During the same time, he’s gone from a disapproval high of 56% to today, where he’s at 53%.
That’s still 11% underwater, which is still bad. But relative to before, it’s an improvement. The Trump administration is likely to believe what turned everything around was him speaking for himself, fighting back, and of course, attacking the media.
HuffPost’s average shows him at 44.6/51.9. A clear trend of disappoval going up and approval plateauing with a slight downward trend. And RealClear’s average has him at 44.7/50.4. Interesting to see that Rasmussen has him at only +2, since he was at +10 a few days ago.
It’s also notable that he hasn’t announced new policies in the last several days. There have been mentions of the ACA repeal, tax cuts, and several other items. But they haven’t dominated the press cycle. We’ll see what happens when policy topics are back at the top of the news.
It’s getting to the point where Russia stories are all blending into one gigantic suspicious dark cloud. Here’s the latest. The Russian ambassador to the UN was found dead in NYC today. Trump is continuing to signal with his words that he wants to be closer to Russia, and behind the scenes there are maneuvers that are pushing plans to do just that. A new component is beginning to show up in the reporting, too: mafia connections. Felix Sater in particular.
I keep saying it. I’ll continue saying it. I just don’t see how Trump climbs out of this Russia sized hole he’s made for himself. He’s going to double down and pretend there’s nothing suspect about his actions. But the more he does, the more nervous congress will get, and they have perhaps more power than he realizes to constrain him.
Oh, and the Sweden thing. Trump referred to incidents in Sweden. They didn’t happen. He doubled down, saying immigration is causing trouble there. It’s not. Now the right-wing is pulling up all the data it can find to support his claim. And Sweden today pointed out that there were more murders where Trump gave his speech (in Florida) than all of Sweden last year. It’s all a distraction, of course. But we just can’t help ourselves from getting pulled in.
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Some interesting news at the later part of the day.
- Trump went with McMaster for his National Security Advisor. From what I can gather, this is good news for people who want competent people running these posts. There’s also evidence that means he’ll actually be able to run things, which runs counter to Trump’s recent micro-managey style up until this point.
- FBI and DOJ investigating rising anti-semetic threats. Ivanka Trump tweeted her support for it obliquely.
- Milo lost his book deal because of things he said about sex with minors. He was also removed from CPAC. I am going to be watching this development very closely because it could lay bare more infighting on the right.
