Today’s ‘Daily Blast’ podcast explored how major news organizations could be making quick assumptions about voters’ approval of President Donald Trump sending troops into California this week.
Trump issued orders for both the U.S. Marines and the National Guard to quell protest after ICE agents enraged the public by detaining immigrant day laborers at a California Home Depot.
Daily Blast host Greg Sargent described Trump going into California and threatening protestors as “befitting a Third-world tinpot dictator,” and asked his guest, analyst G. Elliott Morris about the public possibly viewing this as presidential overreach.
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“[Trump’s] motivation is probably that the politics of sending in the guards and marines is good politics, but that doesn’t seem to immediately be the case,” answered Morris, who pointed to a recent Yougov poll putting Trump’s decision to sic the national guard after protestors at “seven points underwater,” or 38-to-45 percent approval. Sending in the marines came in at “13 points underwater.”
Sargent noticed major news media appeared to be assuming Trump’s invasion of California “is good for Trump,” however. “They’re accepting this as a political win, with Axios writing ‘it’s an opportunity to fuse power with politics and spectacle’ in a ‘fight on his home turf.’ NBC News writes the White House sees this as a ‘wining issue’. But they’re just regurgitating White House spin on this and not subjecting the claims to any independent scrutiny at all,” Sargent said.
“There is complacency,” said Morris, explaining that news media suffers pressure to cut reels so they can have something to say on a topic quickly to quickly “suck in advertising money.” He said commentators and pundits also feel the pressure to offer a quick take, but they often default to Trump’s approval numbers on immigration to guide their opinions.
“But this is not an immigration issue,” warned Morris. “This is a protest, civil rights and law enforcement issue now.”
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Sargent agreed the media could be making a mistake granting “Trump potency on this issue,” by assuming voters automatically look at the spectacle in California as being about immigration. “Why would voters see it that way when what they’re seeing is American troops being sent to an American city in response to a largely peaceful protest?” he asked.
Morris, author of the Strength in Numbers Substack, added that even Trump’s public support on immigration appears to collapse when you expand questions to include the deportation of people other than “criminals”
“My substack recently partnered with a polling company called Verasight and we asked people ‘do you support deporting everyone who here illegally, and that support drops the more they know about the person being deported,” said Morris. “The only thing that was popular was deporting convicted, violent criminals, with 87 percent support. But everyone else, Americans basically say ‘Don’t deport them.’”
Listen to the full ‘Daily Blast’ podcast at this link