U.S. President Donald Trump, in front of a painting of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, smiles during an event to announce that the Space Force Command will move from Colorado to Alabama, in the Oval Office (Reuters)
White House correspondent Andrew Egger tells Bulwark that the U.S. public may appear to be getting nose-blind to Trump’s unending stream of corruption — but it’s not.
“Donald Trump’s constant, open flouting of laws and norms can be paralytic to the mind. It seems like every day it’s another thing — he helps himself to another billion dollars of U.A.E. crypto money, or launches investigations into political enemies, or pardons another tranche of people who tried to help him steal the 2020 election, or threatens the broadcast licenses of TV channels he doesn’t like, and on, and on, and on. It’s easy to fall into the cynical trap of thinking none of it matters — that voters don’t care about this sort of thing anymore,” Egger said.
But that’s an illusion, he added.
Survey firm Blueprint Strategies asked voters a series of straightforward questions about 25 of Trump’s most controversial policies and actions this year: Do they consider those actions authoritarian? And do they approve of them?
“The answer was, largely, ‘yes’ and very much ‘no,’” said Egger. “The fact is that this stuff is deeply, remarkably unpopular, with no real constituency outside the hardcore MAGA base. It’s supplying constant low-level drag on Trump’s approval rating.”
Fifty-four percent of respondents said that signing executive orders to investigate or persecute political enemies qualified as “authoritarian” behavior, as did 50 percent of respondents when asked about deploying the National Guard to blue cities and firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over irritatingly weak job numbers.
And strong pluralities described as “authoritarian” a host of other Trump actions, from firing the head of the National Labor Relations Board to firing DOJ lawyers who worked on cases that Trump didn’t like.
However, Egger said the numbers got considerably more striking when taking into account a category that was pivotal to Trump’s re-election last November.
“These numbers get even more eye-opening when it comes to independents, where strong majorities describe a host of Trump actions as ‘authoritarian’ and a full two thirds register their disapproval for those actions, such as Trump’s threats to pull FCC broadcast licenses from NBC and ABC and his ordering of masked ICE raids nationwide,” reported Egger. “Just under two thirds of independents disapproved of a wide swath of other actions, such as the firing of DOJ lawyers who prosecuted Jan. 6th rioters and the Trump family investing in crypto and using political power to promote it.”
In a better world, “none of this would come as much of a surprise,” said Egger, but voters are indeed “open to the argument that ‘authoritarianism’ describes the Trump project. And they’re repulsed by the project when it is broken down into individual actions and policies.”
Running on the economy and affordability clearly works, according to last Tuesday’s off-year election, but Egger said it apparently should not be the only issue.
“Donald Trump’s inability to control his own appetites for wealth, flattery, and vengeance is deeply unpopular. They must recognize and act on that,” Egger said.
Read the Bulwark report at this link.
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