A Brutal NYT Poll, A Judge Is Arrested, The People Of America And The World Are Just Not Bending The Knee

"It makes me think maybe he doesn't want to stop the war, that he's just tapping me along, and that he has be dealt with differently"

Morning all. Another extraordinary week. My big take away as we head into the weekend - this Trump thing isn’t working as they planned. The strong economy Trump inherited is turning to crap. The tariffs are an economic and political disaster. His poll numbers have cratered. We routed them in Wisconsin and keep overperforming in elections across the country. After ransacking the Capital and trashing Tesla Musk has left town. Hegseth is an ongoing, corrosive embarrassment. Putin and Xi are publicly mocking Trump and reveling in their good fortune that they got such a feckless idiot in the White House. Despite his crude intimidation tactics the circle of defiance is growing. The Courts and the states continue to provide a very, very powerful bulwark against his authoritarian fantasies. The country is recoiling at his cruel treatment of people, his new Gulag, his abandonment of due process and the Constitutional order.

These last few weeks there has been a lot more losing for Trump than winning.

This magical thinking in Trump’s diseased brain about how his “strength” will force the American people and the world to bend the knee is crashing hard against reality. He sees himself as a hero. The nation and the world increasingly sees him as a villain - a foolish, weak, failed, and ridiculous man with his painted face, orange hair and a girdle working overtime. A big blubbery baby man as we like to say here.

Look at this chart from another very rough poll for Trump, a new one from the NYT:

And I once again send along this chart from Pew, findings which have been replicated in other polls:

Here are some excerpts from the NYT write up of their poll. It is in its own way a very powerful act of defiance:

Voters believe President Trump is overreaching with his aggressive efforts to expand executive power, and they have deep doubts about some of the signature pieces of his agenda, a New York Times/Siena College poll found.

The turbulent early months of Mr. Trump’s administration are seen as “chaotic” and “scary” by majorities of voters — even many who approve of the job he is doing. Voters do not view him as understanding the problems in their daily lives and have soured on his leadership as he approaches his 100th day in office.

……..

Now, however, voters express dimming confidence about Mr. Trump’s handling of some of the top issues that propelled him back to the White House, including the economy and immigration……

………..

The president’s pursuit of widespread tariffs — which has caused stock-market drops and gyrations — was opposed by 55 percent of voters, including 63 percent of independents.

Taken together, the survey’s findings show that any second-term honeymoon for Mr. Trump is over. His approval rating among crucial independent voters is now at a woeful 29 percent.

Voters said he had “gone too far” on issue after issue — his tariffs, his immigration enforcement, his cuts to the federal work force. Broad numbers of independent voters sided with Democrats in believing that he had overreached.

Overall, a 54 percent majority said that Mr. Trump was “exceeding the powers available to him,” including 16 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of independent voters.

……….

Broad majorities said they would prefer to place limits on exactly the kinds of powers that Mr. Trump has tried to exercise:

• 61 percent of voters, including 33 percent of Republicans, said a president should not be able to impose tariffs without authorization from Congress.

• 54 percent, including 26 percent of Republicans, said a president should not be able to eliminate programs enacted by Congress.

• 63 percent, including 40 percent of Republicans, said a president should not be able to deport legal immigrants who have protested Israel.

• 73 percent of voters, including 56 percent of Republicans, said a president should not be able to send American citizens to prison in El Salvador, as Mr. Trump has threatened to do.

• And as Mr. Trump’s administration has veered toward open defiance of court orders, a sky-high 76 percent of voters, and 61 percent of Republicans, said a president should not be able to ignore the Supreme Court.

Yesterday the weak and stumbling Trump Administration retreated on yet another outrageous policy, the revocation of student visas:

The Trump administration has restored the student visa registrations of thousands of foreign students studying in the United States who had minor — and often dismissed — legal infractions.

The Justice Department announced the wholesale reversal in federal court Friday after weeks of intense scrutiny by courts and dozens of restraining orders issued by judges who deemed the mass termination of students from a federal database — used by universities and the federal government to track foreign students in the U.S. — as flagrantly illegal.

This week one of the biggest and most powerful donors in the Republican Party, Ken Griffin, sounding like a Hopium reader, explained at an insidery DC conference the damage Trump is doing to America and the "American brand” (via The Bulwark):

Even Fox News is telling the story of his weakness, failure and rejection:

So, yesterday, after weeks of failure, the Supreme Court ruling against him twice, a growing circle of defiance, Putin making a fool of Trump for all the world to see and the country losing faith in him Trump arrests a Judge for what are clearly “Trumped-up” and ridiculous charges. I view this arrest not as a sign of Trumpian strength but one of weakness and desperation. You do not have to beat people into submission if they support you. And this arrest was a clear sign of puerile frustration at the ongoing and serious defiance of the Courts and his losing of his big argument with the American people.

Look at this post from Thursday. It’s like something a child would write.

Yes, Trump is doing a lot of damage to the country, and we cannot for one minute let up in our work. But I think something changed here in the last few weeks. Americans and the world are not buying what Trump is selling. His strongman fantasies are crashing hard into reality. Like Putin’s delusional miscalculation in underestimating Ukraine’s fight and resolve, Trump has grossly underestimated the resistance he would face here and abroad. It doesn’t mean he won’t keep arresting judges on Trumped-up charges; or deporting an American citizen child with cancer; or keep trying to send people to his Salvadoran Gulag; or unraveling our public health system; or waging war against science, research and learning. All of that may continue and we have to keep fighting it all as hard as he can. But this early version of Trump 2.0 has failed. They are constantly in retreat. They’ve lost the country. Folks are not bending the knee. A majority of the country has come to understand the Emperor has no clothes, and has pulled the curtain back from the Wizard. Without his “strength” what many are seeing now is a desperate, pathetic old man, far more a fool, a fuck up and a lame duck than the strongman he sees in the mirror when he applies his spray tan in the morning.

As I was finishing up this morning we got this image of Trump huddling with Zelenskyy in St. Peter’s:

We also got this front page NYT article from Peter Baker about how Putin has played Trump for the fool that he is, How Trump Plays Into Putin’s Hands (gift link). An excerpt:

If President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia drafted a shopping list of what he wanted from Washington, it would be hard to beat what he was offered in the first 100 days of President Trump’s new term.

Pressure on Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia? Check.

The promise of sanctions relief? Check.

Absolution from invading Ukraine? Check.

Indeed, as Mr. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff visited Moscow on Friday for more negotiations, the president’s vision for peace appeared notably one-sided, letting Russia keep the regions it had taken by force in violation of international law while forbidding Ukraine from ever joining NATO.

But that is not all that Mr. Putin has gotten out of Mr. Trump’s return to power. Intentionally or not, many of the president’s actions on other fronts also suit Moscow’s interests, including the rifts he has opened with America’s traditional allies and the changes he has made to the U.S. government itself.

Mr. Trump has been tearing down American institutions that have long aggravated Moscow, such as Voice of America and the National Endowment for Democracy. He has been disarming the nation in its netherworld battle against Russia by halting cyber offensive operations and curbing programs to combat Russian disinformation, election interference, sanctions violations and war crimes.

He spared Russia from the tariffs that he is imposing on imports from nearly every other nation, arguing that it was already under sanctions. Yet he still applied the tariff on Ukraine, the other party he is negotiating with. And in a reversal from his first term, Politico reported that Mr. Trump’s team is reportedly discussing whether to lift sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe, a project he has repeatedly condemned.

“Trump has played right into Putin’s hands,” said Ivo Daalder, the chief executive of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama. “It’s hard to see how Trump would have acted any differently if he were a Russian asset than how he has acted in the first 100 days of his second term.”

And then we got this Trump post this morning, one of the most extraordinary things Trump has ever written or said:

So here is the great Strongman, our own Orangey Wizard, admitting that perhaps he has gotten played by Putin? If he can wake from this dangerous fever dream are there others we can get him to wake from, like understanding that everything he has said about his tariffs is wrong? I still maintain that working to get rid of these tariffs is the most important thing we can be doing in the short term. They are wildly destructive and are doing clear and material harm to every American, Republican and Democrat. They are without question unconstitutional, as Trump is asserting powers in levying these tariffs he simply does not have nor could any leader of any democracy ever have.

Plan on calling your Senators and Reps this week and demand that Congress claw back its authority and rescind these tariffs. 13 states - Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Vermont - have sued the Trump Administration to have the tariffs rolled back. If your state is not on this list call your Governor, Attorney General and state Senators and Reps and demand they join these legal challenges. To learn more about we need to fight these tariffs watch/listen to my interviews with Senators Tim Kaine and Chris Coons, MN AG Keith Ellison and economist Rob Shapiro.

So, finally, friends, let us on this Saturday remind ourselves of where are now:

• We are stronger, he is weaker

• We have to continue to act with great urgency as he is breaking things that will be hard if not impossible to repair

• In seeing public opinion break against Trump we are getting confirmation that our work matters, that minds can change, things can be different and even - shall we say it - better?

Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you. We are making progress, true progress, but have lots and lots of work ahead of us - Simon