President Trump’s Approval Rating Hits Highest Point Yet

The Senate voted as Trump instructed, and President Trump’s approval rating went up. 

There’s a simple phenomena at work here. That phenomena is that everybody loves to back a winner. I’ve experienced a tiny bit of it myself because I have won elections, and I’ve lost elections. 

When I won an election, people who I knew had not been for me suddenly announced that they’d been backing me all along. People who had sworn to my volunteers that there was “no way in hell” they’d ever support me, suddenly announced that their support was the reason I’d won. 

When I lost, people who’d been in my corner all the way claimed that they’d never backed me a moment. I had people whom I had honestly believed were real, personal friends who dumped me like a hot potato when I lost. 

People want to say that they picked a winner. They want to be on the winning side. They’ll lie to maintain the fiction of their winner-backer status. There’s an old saying, “nothing succeeds like success.” Like all old sayings, it’s based on real life experience. 

President Trump is a monstrous excuse for a human being, but he has plowed through all sorts of things that would daunt a normal man. His biggest secrets are that he has no shame and he doesn’t care what he destroys. 

It does not bother him to be caught out in a lie, or lies or constantly lying. He just lies some more. 

He has no problem if the evidence proves him a traitor, he just says “so what?” 

I wrote a few days ago, in a take-off from a line in No Country for Old Men that if he isn’t a psychopath, he’ll do until the psychopath gets here. Trump’s behavior is psychopathic behavior as I have seen it before. 

He doesn’t care if he does wrong. He doesn’t even care if he gets caught. All he cares about is if he wins, with winning hanging on the slender definition of Trump beating others. When he says “so what?” he means it. 

This attracts a certain kind of person. Weak men mistake viciousness and abusing women as traits of an alpha male. They line up behind guys like this because of something or other that I don’t understand in their male psyches. I don’t understand it, but I’ve seen it over and over. 

Self-hating women are equally attracted to these psychopathic types. Witness the women who went ape over Chris Watts, Ted Bundy, and Charles Manson. They want to sleep with these bad guys and have their babies. They will defend these monsters against all comers with a crazy fury that defies description. 

The attracting power of monsters in politics is writ in blood and horror throughout human history. It can lead to world wars, genocides, mass rapes and the torture, imprisonment and slaughter of untold numbers. 

We are seeing mass migrations of people all over the globe, fleeing from psychopaths with power. We are also seeing what appears to be a genocide in Yemen, blessed by our psychopathic president. 

A saner people would toss Trump out of office and straight into prison. My parent’s generation would have coughed him out like a plug of phlegm. My grandparents would never have given him the time of day in the first place. 

It takes a people who have lost their sanity to support an obvious, doesn’t-hide-it mental case like Trump. It takes people who are slightly unhinged themselves to lie for him the way his followers do and give America away in order to maintain their fantasy that he’s their messiah.

I don’t altogether blame them for this. I could write a whole book about how this happened, how it was done to us over a long period of time. But the fact remains that we are in a terrible mess. America itself is at stake. 

Trump is a monster and if he wins another term and no longer has to fear re-election, we are in for some historic times. 

Meanwhile, the Democrats are too fey to throw up a winning candidate. I saw that James Carville is sounding the alarm bells about this. His comment, that the Democratic Party is not an “ideological club,” is well taken. Again, I’ve experienced the private-club Democratic Party myself when they hung the pro-lifers-not-welcome sign around my neck. 

What Carville didn’t say is that the Republicans had devolved down to an ideological club a long time ago. I’m not talking about their pro life stance. While there are many sincere pro life people in the Republican Party, the party itself views pro life as a means to their end. It is their vote-getting position that they’ve used to raid the treasury and create federal courts who will rule in favor of the wealthy, which is their real ideology. 

We are in the process of allowing our democracy to be destroyed right in front of us, in real time. I have been the recipient of enough inconsistent but highly aggressive verbal abuse and outright confabulation on the part of a few Trump supporters to come to the conclusion that abortion is, for at least some of them, their excuse rather than their cause. 

These people are lying for Trump. They’re lying almost as much as Trump does himself. Some of their lies would be comical if the situation weren’t so grave. They deny he said things he shouted out in public venues and on video. They deny he did things that are well documented. You can show them the documentation or the videos and they’ll deny what they’re seeing and reading. They pretend that he’s a moral person, or that morality doesn’t matter. They lie for Trump.

That is not the action of people who are deluded. It is the action of someone who is, at least to some extent, fully culpable for what they are doing. It is the action of a willing and active partner in perpetrating Trump’s lies and defending his crimes. 

I don’t think abortion is their reason. The practical politics of the situation simply do not support that. We have the five votes on the Supreme Court necessary to overturn Roe. Rational pro life people would be focused on making sure that they do, in fact, overturn. 

Lying for Trump not only doesn’t help overturn Roe, it actually works against it. It gives the Court incentive to do some sort of half measure instead of overturning. It does that because anyone who’s still half-way rational can see that Trump’s ardent followers don’t care if Roe is overturned. They would probably be upset if it was overturned. Overturning Roe and Casey would take away the club they use to bully and attack other people. 

As for Trump’s religious leaders, without legal abortion to use, they are worthless to Trump or anyone else. Their gravitas is gone. 

Trump’s numbers went up this week. Meanwhile, the Ds started the process of shooting themselves in both feet. 

We are living in historic times.