Trump’s Iceberg Is Ahead

Aaron Blake writes at WaPo that Trump’s base is officially crumbling.

Trump assured us Monday that it was “stronger than ever.”

Then came more polls that drive home how untrue that is.

A CNN poll and an Investor’s Business Daily poll, both released late Monday, show somewhat different pictures of Trump’s overall approval. The CNN poll pegs it at 38 percent — around where it has been in other polling for a while — while the IBD poll shows it at a painfully low 32 percent. That’s the lowest of any high-quality poll in Trump’s entire presidency.

Investor’s Business Daily is a right-wing rag. If Trump has lost IBD … And note that FiveThirtyEight gives the IBD/TIPP poll an A- rating, which means it’s one of the more reliable polls.

These polls come on the heels of a Quinnipiac University poll last week that also showed Trump’s strong approval among Republicans dropping off. In that poll, just 53 percent of Republicans strongly approved of the president — down from a previous low of 62 percent.

Another common thread running through these polls is Trump’s decline among the working-class voters who were so key to his win in the 2016 election. The Q poll last week showed them disapproving of Trump more than they approved of him for the first time. The IBD poll shows Trump’s biggest decline coming among those making between $30,000 and $50,000 per year; 40 percent of this group approved of Trump last month, but it’s down to 27 percent today. Another of the biggest declines was among high school-educated voters, among whom Trump’s approval dropped by 11 points. The CNN poll shows Trump’s strong approval among whites without college degrees declining from 47 percent in February to 35 percent today. This is a group among which Trump beat Hillary Clinton more than 2-to-1.

Trump has not been looking good at FiveThirtyEight for awhile, either. The Gallup daily tracking poll has had Trump’s approval bouncing between 36 and 39 for the past month. The last time he was at 40 was July 9.

From Inspired Traveller at http://www.inspiredtraveller.in/trip-titanic-wreck-sleeping-darkness-100-years/

However, it’s possible Trump is not completely aware of how badly he’s doing in the polls. Matt Yglesias writes at Vox:

As Alex Thompson of Vice News, citing “three current and former White House officials,” reports: In the morning at 9:30 and then around 4:30 in the afternoon, Trump is presented with a briefing document full of people praising him.

The folders, according to Thompson, “are filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.”

The point of this is to improve the notoriously media-obsessed president’s mood by reminding him he has a lot of fans and admirers out there, and in a hilarious detail, reportedly some in the White House even refer to this clip package as “the Propaganda Document.” And, in a very bad way, it is.

A psychologically normal person in Trump’s situation would be keeping a watch out for icebergs, so to speak. But like the crew of the The Titanic, Trump assumes he is unsinkable and is unprepared for disaster.

Speaking of disaster, the New York Times just reported this a few minutes ago:

President Trump threatened on Tuesday to unleash “fire and fury” against North Korea if it endangers the United States as tensions with the isolated nuclear-armed state grow into perhaps the most serious foreign policy challenge yet in his young administration.

“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Mr. Trump told reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state and as I said they will be met with fire and fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

Yeah, real smart, dude. Kim Jong-un will continue to make threats. What are you actually going to do?