At a time when it seems like the entire political world has gone mad, I offer some welcome perspective this morning from E.J. Dionne:
- President Obama’s approval rate is currently 53 percent. At a similar point in George W. Bush’s presidency, his standing had fallen to 32 percent.
- Donald Trump’s favorability rating is a minuscule 33 percent, and just 34 percent among independents. The vast majority of his support comes from Republicans, 64 percent of whom view him favorably.
Dionne writes:
Trumpism is not sweeping the nation. It has a strong foothold only in the Republican Party, and not even all of it….
We are allowing a wildly and destructively inaccurate portrait of us as a people to dominate our imaginations and debase our thinking.
We’ve got a long way to go between now and November. As Dionne notes, the successes of Trump and Bernie Sanders “reveal the discontent of Americans who have been left out in our return to prosperity.” (Needless to say, even though both Trump and Sanders have embraced economic populism, only Sanders has managed to do so without couching it in the language of racism and violence.)
But it’s wrong to think that the entire country has gone nuts. Just part of it. And I agree with Dionne that the media could do a far better job of making that clear.
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