A new NYTimes poll [gift link] confirms what my spidey sense has been feeling: Trump is sinking in the esteem of the people as he blunders to the 100 day mark of his term. Even FoxNews has noticed he's stuck below recent presidents. That doesn't mean he's no longer dangerous, but there is a shift.
Simon Rosenberg's Hopium Chronicles project can come across as a little hokey. He's an FDR Democrat, forever believing that Democrats will someday push a social welfare state over the finish line. But in the present political situation, he deserves credit for building one community of resistance activists whose intensity is second to none, folks who diligently and strategically push Dems to act as their best selves instead of cowering in confusion.
He sums up the present moment this way:
... 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. ...
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 [fight us]. 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.
... 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?
Let's keep the pressure on from all our very different communities ...
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