Politics – Media Nation

Why polling averages may not capture the depths of Trump’s growing unpopularity

*The New York Times average of Trump polls.*

For most of his first term and now his second, Donald Trump has been deeply unpopular. Both The New York Times and polling analyst Nate Silver track his approval/disapproval ratings based on an average of polls.

As of Monday, Trump was at 55% disapprove/41% approve using the Times’ methodology. Silver has him at a nearly identical 55.4% disapproval/41% approval. There are others who do the same thing, but the Times and Silver may be the best known.

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Yet despite everything, Trump’s numbers don’t move as much as you might think they would given the corrupt and chaotic nature of his presidency. Indeed, on Monday, Trump’s disapproval rating actually nudged down by a statistically insignificant amount, from 56% to 55%. And no matter what, a rock-solid minority of just over 40% sticks with him. How could this be?

This morning I’d like to suggest one possible explanation. I’m not a polling expert, but this is obvious and starting us right in the face. The Times’ average is based on a number of polls, some of which it regards as highly reliable, some of which it doesn’t. And, for the most part, Trump is doing considerably worse when measured solely by highly reliable polls.

For instance, the most recent Gallup poll shows Trump at minus 24, with 60% disapproving of his job performance and just 36% approving. The American Research Group has him at minus 27, with 62% approval/35% disapproval. Beacon Research/Shaw and Co. reports that Trump is at minus 17, Ipsos at minus 22.

Now, as I said, the Times showed Trump’s disapproval rating ticked down slightly on Monday. And when you look at the chart, you see that it’s because a poll from TIPP Insights was added to the mix. TIPP, which does not meet the Times’ criteria for reliability, had Trump at just minus 4, based on 43% approval/47% disapproval.

Some of the less reliable polls, especially YouGov, do show Trump with a disapproval gap as wide as the reliable polls. But when you scan down the list, you see a number of less reliable polls showing that Trump’s disapproval rating is on the narrow side — Morning Consult (minus 7), InsiderAdvantage (minus 5), Big Data Poll (minus 5) and RMG Research (minus 7).

As I said, I’m not a polling expert, and it’s likely that the Times has weighted the reliable polls more heavily than the more dubious surveys. But Gallup, in particular, has been the gold standard for generations, and maybe we ought to take them more seriously than an index that includes both the good and the bad.

Why does it matter? Because if Trump is losing support, then the likelihood increases that House and Senate Republicans will be willing to stand up to him at least occasionally. Until recently, the Republicans have been utterly craven, cheering enthusiastically for Trump’s every incoherent pronouncement.

But now we’re starting to see a little movement. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one sign. Another is that Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker the other day actually referred to Pete Hegseth as the “secretary of defense” rather than his cosplay role as the “secretary of war.”

Hegseth posts demented tweet following charges that he ordered the killings of two injured men

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Pete Hegseth, our seriously deranged secretary of defense, posted this on Twitter Sunday night. As of this moment, it’s still up.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that, back in September, Hegseth ordered that two injured men clinging to a boat in the Caribbean that U.S. forces had just blown apart be killed in a second attack. Experts have already said that Hegseth could be charged with murder, war crimes or both.

As you might expect, Hegseth’s shockingly demented tweet is inspiring a host of memes. Here’s one:

Donald Trump has denied that Hegseth ordered the killings, but we’re starting to see the first stirrings of Republicans Congress demanding accountability. We’ll see how far that goes.

‘Things happen’ — and for one brief moment, The Washington Post rediscovers its soul

Jamal Khashoggi. Photo (cc) 2018 by POMED.

The Washington Post’s increasingly Trump-friendly editorial page has rediscovered its soul, however briefly.

In a piece published Tuesday afternoon, the Post tears into Donald Trump for his friendly White House get-together with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who, according to a CIA intelligence assessment, was behind the 2018 murder of Saudi dissident (and Post columnist) Jamal Khashoggi.

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The editorial is unsigned, which means that it represents the institutional voice of the newspaper, including its owner, Jeff Bezos. Better still, The New York Times reports that Bezos was not among the tech moguls who attended Trump’s dinner for bin Salman, even though others were there — including Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Dell’s Michael Dell, Cisco’s Chuck Robbins, Elon Musk and others.

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One good reason the shutdown should have continued; plus, a settlement in Kansas, and Kara Miller’s new podcast

*Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has been harshly criticized for his handling of the government shutdown. Photo (cc) 2024 by the Jewish Democratic Council of America.*

We’ve been hashing out the pros and cons of ending the government shutdown on Facebook this week. My position has been that the Democrats shouldn’t have caved, but that it was a close call. Certainly the shutdown couldn’t have gone on too much longer, especially with families in danger of going hungry and federal workers not receiving paychecks.

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More than anything, I didn’t see any possible way that the Democrats could achieve their stated objective of forcing Donald Trump and the Republican Congress to extend health-care subsidies. The government could have stayed shut for six more months and that wouldn’t have changed.

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With midnight approaching, here are my last three New York Times gift links for October

It’s that most wonderful time of the month, when I’ve got a few gift links to The New York Times that I haven’t used and I want to share them with my readers. These links will turn into pumpkins at midnight, which is appropriate on Halloween. (That is, they’d turn into unshareable pumpkins for me. Now that I’ve shared them, you should be able to use them indefinitely.) So please enjoy.

“The Debate Dividing the Supreme Court’s Liberal Justices,” by Jodi Kantor. This is by far the most significant of the three, and it’s absolutely fascinating. Kantor’s major thrust is that Justice Elena Kagan is trying to stick with her longstanding approach of being conciliatory in the hopes of occasionally pulling Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett to her side, whereas Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has put the right-wing majority on blast.

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Trump’s targeted killings of civilians at sea are the worst thing he has done as president

Donald Trump is wreaking so much havoc and engaging in so much corruption that it’s hard to stay focused. But I urge all of us to keep our eye on this: He is killing civilians from Venezuela and Colombia in the Caribbean and, now, in the Pacific. The number is up to 43 victims.

Charlie Savage, who is one of The New York Times’ most perceptive reporters, has written a news analysis that places Trump’s actions in perspective. With Trump’s apologists perpetually engaging in whatabout-whatabout-whatabout, Savage notes that Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush went out of their way to come up with legal justifications for drone strikes against Al Qaeda (in Obama’s case) and for torturing terrorism suspects (in Bush’s).

You may not like what Obama and Bush did (I certainly don’t), but the point is that they understood the rule of law had to be asserted, even if they were paying it little more than lip service. By contrast, Trump is just killing people who may or may not be drug smugglers and who have the right to be arrested and tried, not “blown apart, burned alive or drowned,” as Savage puts it. He writes:

Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.

Savage adds: “In peacetime, targeting civilians — even suspected criminals — who pose no threat of imminent violence is considered murder. In an armed conflict, it is a war crime.”

Trump might ponder that one of his favorite former dictators, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, is on trial before the International Court of Justice in The Hague for accusations that he was involved in dozens of killings in an attempt to crack down on illegal drugs.

You don’t have to draw a convoluted analogy. Trump is doing exactly the same thing that Duterte is accused of doing, and he’s reveling in it publicly. It is the worst thing he’s done as president, and that’s saying a lot.

Trump may have worked himself into a lather over Portland by watching 5-year-old footage on Fox News

Did Donald Trump get excited about sending troops into Portland, Oregon, because he was watching 5-year-old footage on Fox News depicting violence in the streets? It would appear that the answer is yes.

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Independent journalist Philip Bump, part of the Washington Post diaspora, reported that Fox ran B-roll from Portland during segments with Homeland Security official Tricia McLaughlin and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Sept. 27 showing a violent protest in Portland that included fires, what appears to be tear gas, and demonstrators squaring off with law enforcement. But the footage is dated June 2020. Who knows if Trump was paying attention?

Bump offers this as well:

In an interview with NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor, he described a conversation he’d had with Oregon’s governor.

“I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different,’” Trump said of the conversation. “They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place … it looks like terrible.”

Well, yes, Man Who Has Access to the Breadth of Federal Intelligence Gathering. What you saw on TV was in fact not what was happening at the moment in Portland.

Mike Masnick writes at TechDirt, “The President of the United States — who has access to better intelligence than anyone on Earth — is moving to deploy military forces against American citizens based on what he saw on TV and what his ‘people’ told him, without bothering to verify whether any of it was real.” Masnick adds:

So half of this story is that we have a mad king who will fall for anything he sees on Fox News without bothering to first find out whether it’s true or not.

That’s terrifying!

But the other part is that his “people” around him are clearly abusing the senile President to take advantage of the situation to play out their own violent fantasies.

Alicia Victoria Lozano of NBC News reports that Trump activated 200 National Guard troops on Friday in order to respond to the non-existent violence. City and state officials sued to stop the deployment, and a ruling is expected later today.

Looking back at Jill Lepore’s ‘These Truths’ and what she said about race, class and identity politics

*Jill Lepore at the 2023 Kentucky Author Forum. Photo (cc) by uoflphoto3.*

Over the weekend I finished the audio version of Jill Lepore’s monumental survey of American history, “These Truths,” published in 2018. At 960 pages or, in my case, 29 hours, the book is a major commitment, but it’s well worth it.

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That said, one thing I learned was that I already knew a lot about American history, so much of “These Truths” was familiar to me. There’s nothing startlingly revisionistic about it, but it nevertheless works as a skillfully executed and gracefully written overview of the past 500 years, from Columbus to Trump. I especially appreciated her extensive treatment of Black and women’s history.

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Quincy’s controversial mayor steps in it again with anti-LGBTQ remarks about the Catholic sexual-abuse crisis

Quincy City Hall, built in 1844. Photo (cc) 2019 by Antony-22.

Thomas Koch, the mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts, is under fire for blurting out on a radio talk show that the Catholic Church sexual-abuse crisis was a matter of “mostly homosexual issues, not pedophilia.”

Koch’s remarks, made on “NightSide with Dan Rea” on WBZ Radio, is just the latest controversy the mayor has jumped into, including a clearly unconstitutional plan to install two 10-foot statues of Catholic saints on public property at the city’s new public safety building (the subject of a New England Muzzle Award last May) and a 79% increase to his salary, from $159,000 to $285,000.

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Thomas Koch (via city of Quincy website)

Adam Reilly of GBH News reports that Koch’s remarks on Dan Rea’s talk show came during a discussion of public antipathy toward religion, something that Koch and Rea both lamented. But when Rea brought up the “pedophile priest crisis,” Koch went off the rails. Reilly writes:

At that point Koch interjected, saying, “That was mostly homosexual issues, not pedophilia.” When Rea pushed back, saying there were lots of children and early teenagers who were impacted by abuse, Koch replied, “There were? Well, pedophilia’s a younger age than to me a teenager. But that’s another issue for another day. I [unintelligible] either at all, believe me.”

Reilly notes that Koch later apologized for his remarks:

Koch sent GBH News a statement after this article’s [initial] publication Thursday, saying that he had apologized directly to the local schools and LGBTQ+ community at a schools committee meeting Wednesday night. He said his comments were “ill-thought remarks” and he was caught off guard by the issue.

The incident prompted an editorial from the Boston Herald calling on Koch to resign (sub. req.), referring to his “insane lack of empathy,” adding:

On a basic human level, the mayor should be ashamed of himself. The crisis in the Catholic church will only truly heal when everyone acknowledges the institutional cancer that metastasized.

Meanwhile, Quincy voters will not have an opportunity to scale back Koch’s salary grab, which was approved earlier this year by the city council. Robert Bosworth reports for The Quincy Sun that a ballot measure to grant Koch a more modest 15% increase, to $183,000, fell short of the signature requirement. As a result, Simón Rios of WBUR observes, Koch will receive a higher salary than the mayors of Boston and New York City.

I awarded a Muzzle to Koch for pushing a plan to erect statues of two Catholic saints on public property after the ACLU of Massachusetts, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation sued the city on the grounds that it would violate the First Amendment separation of church and state. As Peter Blandino reported (sub. req.) for The Patriot Ledger of Quincy:

The statues depict St. Michael and St. Florian, the patron saints of policed officers and firefighters respectively. Plans for the statues, which have already been paid for at the price of $850,000, were developed by Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch and a close circle of advisors without informing residents or city councilors.

According to earlier reporting by Blandino, the statues had been criticized by at least one member of the city council as well as some local religious organizations. The ACLU voiced its objections as far back as February. But that didn’t stop Koch, who has insisted that the statues represent bravery, courage and service rather than religious messages.

The case was heard earlier this month in Norfolk Superior Court, reports Neal Riley of WBZ-TV. A ruling is expected soon.

A pink-slime network is looking for ‘anti-American’ teaching materials at public universities in Mass.

*Pink-slime mold. Photo (cc) 2017 by Rachel Hahs.*

A network of more than 1,200 websites better known for publishing so-called pink slime designed to look like legitimate local news is now branching out.

Kirk Carapezza reports for GBH News that Metric Media is flooding public colleges and universities in Massachusetts with public-records requests in order to find what its founder, Brian Timpone, calls “anti-American” classroom materials. The company is also seeking to learn the number of Chinese nationals enrolled as students at those institutions.

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“There’s great public interest in what public universities are teaching students,” Timpone told Carapezza. “We want to see what they’re teaching and why.” Among the institutions that Metric Media has targeted are Salem State University, UMass Boston and Bridgewater State University.

I was one of the people who Kirk interviewed, and as I told him, I was surprised to see Metric Media taking such a pro-active role. Timpone’s various media ventures over the years have been involved in passive, money-making operations such as publishing alleged local news produced by distant employees, some in the Philippines, as the public radio program “This American Life” reported way back in 2012.

In recent years, Metric Media pink-slime sites such as North Boston News (a travel tip for those of you who aren’t from around here: North Boston is not a place that actually exists) have been publishing weirdly irrelevant slop, perhaps produced by AI. If you look right now, for instance, North Boston News features repetitive pseudo-stories on school test scores, high school sports and gas prices.

In 2021, the Columbia Journalism Review published the results of an investigation that showed Metric Media has ties to a variety of right-wing interests.

The public-records law in Massachusetts is notoriously weak, yet teaching materials such as syllabuses and reading lists at public institutions are arguably covered by it. Since I teach at Northeastern University, a private institution, it’s not something I have to be concerned about. On the face of it, I’m not sure why the two should be treated differently.

In any case, it will be interesting to see what Metric Media does with this material. And by “interesting,” I don’t mean to suggest that it will be anything good.