'Off the rails': Poll reveals a new Trump weakness in an unexpected place

The New Republic reports President Donald Trump’s May 21 press conference “flew off the rails” as a new Marquette Law School poll showed unanticipated weakness on what is considered one of the president’s strongest issues.

Trump’s Wednesday press conference was a wild ride with the president blasting an NBC reporter for daring to ask about a $400 million luxury jet gift he accepted from the royal family of Qatar. This appeared a sensitive issue because Trump continued on a tear over it. He also groused at “fake news” when asked why he was resettling white Afrikaners in the U.S. while closing the U.S. resettlement program to all other refugees. Then he got brutally fact-checked by news organizations for trying to publicly sell the myth of white genocide in South Africa, most directly to the president of South Africa, who clearly wasn’t buying it and called him out on it to his face.

But even as Trump’s presser tumbled into the gutter, the New Republic presented a new poll discovering disapproval of Trump’s handling of the immigration issue, particularly among independents.

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At issue is Trump’s aggressive deportation of long-term legal residents, which—coupled with several other issues brewing against the president—could prove a catalyst to opposition.

Labor strategist Michael Podhorzer spoke with Greg Sargent on the The Daily Blast podcast about the new poll and the brewing resentment the public appears to have for their new president at a time when Trump should still be skipping through his presidential honeymoon phase.

Podhorzer and Sargent cited the new Marquette Law School national survey showing the public disapproves of Trump’s method of deporting legal residents who have lived here for years, with 60 percent of independents in opposiiton.

“Those are striking numbers,” said Sargent, adding however that “Trump … said he was going to deport everybody. He promised giant camps. He promised something like fascism in response to a supposed crisis in response to an enemy within, and I don’t think the public thought they were going to get what they’re getting.”

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“Absolutely not,” said Podhorzer, “and, more importantly … polling on those specific questions were always against the things you’re talking about. It’s not like people changed their mind about people living here without a criminal record.”

But the strategist said pollsters rarely ask respondents comprehensive questions about things Trump is promising because they may sound overtly fascist.

“If you say what [Trump] is going to do in an accurate way, you’re being partisan. So, you only get questions like “who’s better on immigration,” Podhorzer said. “It was their insistence of not wanting to look partisan that they didn’t ask more exploring questions about what looked like fascism.”

In that same Marquette poll, only 17 percent of respondents said they completely trust Trump, 28 percent “mostly” trust him. However, 15 percent “mostly do not” trust him, and 40 percent “completely do not” trust him.

But Podhorzer said Trump openly told the public he was going to be corrupt “when he met with oil executives and put a specific price tag of $1 billion on delivering their agenda for them,” but the public had not taken his purported corruption seriously.

“[Elites] told us [overt corruption] couldn’t really happen,” Podhorzer told Sargent.

Hear the full Daily Blast podcast here.