Conservative columnist William Kristol is not expecting to be won over by President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech tonight.
“Let’s be honest: Tonight will be depressing,” said Kristol in the Bulwark. “When the sergeant at arms proclaims in a stentorian voice to the House chamber, ‘Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States,’ we will be reminded, vividly and unavoidably, that Donald Trump is the president of the United States. Which is depressing.”
But Kristol reports a silver lining stretching along that “undeniably dark cloud.”
When Trump spoke to a joint session of Congress almost a year ago, his support was 49 percent approval, 48 percent disapproval six weeks into his term, according to the New York Times.
“Today, … Trump has lost about one sixth of his approval in the last year,” said Kristol. “A new poll from CNN is even more dramatic, showing Trump at 36 percent approval today, down from 48 percent in that same poll a year ago. That suggests one in four of his original supporters deserting him. … So Trump has lost considerable ground.”
Kristol said he wished even more of the public had changed its mind, but “there’s lots of evidence they’re en route to decisively saying ‘Enough’ at the polls this November. The new G. Elliott Morris poll has the Democrats up ten points on the congressional generic ballot. And it’s more likely that public opinion will continue to move in the direction it’s been going than that it will reverse course.”
The public might still reverse course if Trump changed course, but he’s not likely to do that, said Kristol. He’s not going to end his unpopular mass-deportation agenda. Nor is he going to apologize to the people of Minnesota for putting them under siege, or to the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were shot and killed by Trump’s Homeland Security forces.
Likewise, the Weekly Standard founder is confident Trump won’t speak directly to the Epstein survivors in the House gallery, or secure some measure of justice for them. He won’t admit that his Justice Department failed to comply with the law he signed three months ago and do a full release of all the Epstein documents. Kristol said Trump also will not back away “from his obsession with tariffs, which have not produced economic gains and show no prospect of doing so.”
Kristol said “it’s worth noting that [Trump’s] public rejection has happened without war and without a recession, two common proximate causes of a decline in presidential popularity. So, it appears to be the old argument of the people turning against a “tyrant [who is] unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
But unfit rulers often hold on to power, warned Kristol, and Trump — with his enablers and resources — will “not go gently into their well-deserved night.”
“Tonight Trump will, as Steve Bannon memorably put it, ‘flood the zone with s——,’” assured Kristol. “The good news is that the American people seem increasingly sickened by the odor. But we have a long struggle ahead to get rid of it.”
