US President Donald Trump has Republican support after highest approval rating since modern polling began
THE Trump administration is fulfilling its agenda as its opponents continue to operate at a level of shrill hysteria that is tiresome and ultimately self-defeating, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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THE Trump administration is fulfilling its agenda as its opponents, including the overwhelming bulk of the media, continue to operate at a level of shrill hysteria that is tiresome and ultimately self-defeating.
Much of the media, including here in Australia, remain preoccupied with the superficial from President Donald Trump’s playboy past to his weekend tweet mocking NBA star LeBron James, while the Republican base is focused on substantive change.
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In what is an astonishing feat, given the volume and ferocity of the negative press, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans soared to 88 per cent, according to the latest WSJ/NBC poll taken from July 15-18, making it the highest approval achieved by any president within his own party since modern polling began 70 years ago — with the single exception of George W. Bush post-9/11.
At the same point in their presidencies, Jimmy Carter had an approval rating of 52 per cent, Bill Clinton 67 per cent and Barack Obama 81 per cent among Democrats while Ronald Reagan was at 79 per cent among Republicans.
Media and political pundits afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome have cried wolf one too many times.
Trust in the media is at historic lows in the US after much of the Fourth Estate lost any semblance of rationality and impartiality in covering Trump through the election campaign and since his inauguration. The lines between opinion and news have been entirely blurred.
The unrelenting negative coverage would’ve destroyed most other politicians but Trump has a Teflon quality to criticism, thanks largely to his enemies consistently overplaying their hands. Among Trump’s greatest assets is that he is blessed with a multitude of thoroughly unpleasant and unhinged enemies who seem determined to have him re-elected.
Fake News may be a term that was coined by the Hillary Clinton camp but it has become a catchcry for conservatives to describe the falsehoods, half-truths and deliberate omissions of “news” reporting that is boldly biased.
The booming economy doesn’t get the coverage afforded Trump’s dalliances with strippers and playmates or the Russian conspiracy theory but it is what matters most to the heartland.
Trump’s overall approval rating is somewhere between 45 and 50 per cent, depending on the poll, but his support among Republicans has remained sky high and steady, while his approval rating among Democrats has been recorded as low as 7 per cent in the Pew Research Centre survey published this month.
The “partisan gap” is something we also saw with Obama, who had an 81 per cent approval rating among Democrats compared with 14 per cent among Republicans. But despite his low ranking with Democrats, Trump’s overall popularity is superior to many other world leaders who enjoy a far easier run with the media.
Emmanuel Macron hit a new low of 36.3 per cent in France last week, Theresa May also plummeted to a new low in late July with only 30 per cent of Brits satisfied with her performance, while support for Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats’ alliance fell to a new low in the latest polling released on the weekend. However, the German Chancellor’s personal approval rating is at a relatively healthy 46 per cent.
Trump, perhaps remembering Reagan’s “dance with the one that brung ya” advice to conservatives, hasn’t made the mistake of other centre-Right leaders around the world who abandon their base to try to appeal to people who are never going to vote for them.
Sweeping tax cuts have boosted employment and economic activity, with the GDP rising by an impressive annualised rate of 4.1 per cent in the second quarter — a figure that many economic and political pundits deemed unachievable a year ago.
American workers have seen their wages rise by the biggest margin in a decade, according to the Labour Department’s employment-cost index, thanks largely to a combination of low unemployment and strong consumer confidence.
In June, the number of job ads exceeded the number of job seekers for the first time since such data was kept, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unemployment has fallen to 3.9 per cent with an average of 215,000 jobs created each month in 2018.
Predictions of doom, gloom and Armageddon have been regurgitated ad nauseam from the moment Trump triumphed over Clinton but the reality has made fools of the doomsayers, including once-renowned economists such as Paul Krugman who, writing for The New York Times on the day after the election, predicted the share market would “never recover” from a Trump presidency.
Krugman also warned that Trump would cause “a global recession with no end in sight”.
The economy may be at the heart of the administration’s success with conservative voters but there are plenty of other reasons why Republicans, even some from the “never Trump” camp, are embracing Trump’s agenda, and chief among them is judicial appointments.
Supreme Court appointments are enormously important to the base, as is Trump’s enthusiasm for a fight — whether it’s the culture wars or securing better deals from trading partners. Republicans have seen too many gentlemanly Republican presidents and presidential candidates slaughtered by a partisan Leftist media.
This time, they elected a fighter and thus far, he is delivering.
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