Trump round up: plummeting popularity, Tulsi Gabbard and MAGA, that plane crash, and bullying Colombia

Your guide to this week's important news

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For as long as the Trump administration keeps doing crazy things at a crazy pace, I’ll keep doing these weekly round-ups.

So that’ll be for the next four years, then. Let’s dive in.

Trump’s plummeting popularity

Something that was disquieting to a lot of liberals during last year’s election campaign was that Trump’s “favorables” (the number of people saying they had a favorable opinion of him) were consistently higher than they had ever been historically. Whether it was a reaction against Biden or sympathy following Trump’s attempted assassination, more Americans seemed to be digging Trump. In the last few weeks, it even looked like Trump might have net positive approval ratings, something he has never previously achieved.

Then he took office and started doing things.

Polling from the first week of Trump’s term in office looks pretty bad for him, and will probably rob him of ever achieving net positive ratings, absent some massive external event (wars, for instance, tend to make presidents more popular). The number of people expressing an unfavorable opinion of Trump leaped 7% in a week according to a Reuters poll, with pretty much all of his early moves opposed by majorities of the public.

Those polled reserved particular hate for pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists, ending birthright citizenship, and even renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. But they weren’t too keen on tariffs, withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords, or Trump’s attack on “DEI” either.

For a liberal, it’s hard not to respond to this with an enormous facepalm. Trump is doing everything that he said he would do, and doing it in his trademark chaotic and hate-filled style, yet people seem to be surprised. Unfortunately, the American constitutional system doesn’t allow for buyer’s remorse - there’s no plausible way to get rid of Trump for another four years. This backlash will provide the fuel for Democratic victories in the coming elections, but only if Trump doesn’t dismantle the constitution before then.

Tulsi Gabbard and MAGA

Tulsi Gabbard is facing an uphill struggle to be confirmed as Director of National Intelligence, the position responsible for overseeing America’s vast intelligence apparatus. And little wonder: she has a history of cozying up to foreign dictators and parroting Russian propaganda. She’s also a political opportunist rather than someone with a serious lifelong commitment to objectively understanding the risks to U.S. national security. Many senators, including Republicans, simply think she can’t be trusted with access to any sensitive intelligence - much less the keys to the entire kingdom.

But there’s something else I find interesting about Gabbard’s nomination, which is the way that it exposes some of the cracks in the MAGA coalition. In that coalition, Trump has brought together a set of political bedfellows united only by their hatred of “the establishment” and mainstream liberalism. Hardcore right-wing MAGA constitution-haters are part of this, but so are harder-to-define fringe figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Joe Rogan, and Gabbard.

Trump is the glue that holds this coalition together - someone who, through his own open disregard for norms and hatred of “the establishment”, can have broad appeal to disaffected voters and elites of all stripes. The fact that Trump has few core principles and that he mostly attacks “the establishment” for selfish, ego-driven reasons is actually an advantage. It allows both the far right, the far left, and everybody in between to project their wishes onto him, imagining they can make him their tool.

That worked pretty well for Trump during the election campaign. But governing with this coalition is a different matter. By trying to reward Gabbard with a key position in his administration, Trump has led many in his party to balk. Gabbard, who has met with Bashar al-Assad, excused Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and defended mega-leaker Edward Snowden, is a much-loved figure on the far left. Russian state media elevates and praises her. And for many Republican national security hawks - plus those who are, more quietly, uneasy about her religion - it’s a step too far.

Trump, of course, has his own fancy for foreign dictators - particularly Putin. And he’s been sympathetic to figures like Snowden, whose story can be seen as one of victimhood by “the deep state”. He also doesn’t really care much about sensitive intelligence, as anyone who has seen pictures of the bathroom at Mar-a-Lago can testify. There’s still a reasonably good chance he’ll manage to force Gabbard though.

But when she’s actually in the job, the cracks in the coalition will only become clearer.

That plane crash

The plane crash in Washington, D.C. this week was horrific and terrifying - particularly if, like me, you’re soon flying into the American capital, which has some of the most congested airspace in the world.

It has also raised questions about whether Trump’s ongoing assault on the federal government is in some way responsible. There are certainly a lot of reasons to think that it could have contributed. Among them: