What The Hell America!

So we’ve got the polls are fake. We’ve got, You can’t look at the polls because Trump’s agenda isn’t built for 100 days. And then you’ve got Maria Bartiromo, who is a Fox Business host—at one point a very credible business reporter but now just a raging Trumpist—who explained that it’s just impossible not to see that the administration is a huge success. “There’s no other way to look at this first 100 days other than a huge success” is what she said. And I guess the majority of Americans who disagree—and Fox’s own poll about that—are just delusional.

Sargent: Well, yeah, there was another interesting argument on Fox News from contributor Ari Fleischer. He said, “The base will not crack,” and added, “The base is solid for Donald Trump.” Fleischer said that the base will give him plenty of leeway because, again, he’s supposedly taking on these big consequential issues. Now, I don’t know how solid the base is for Trump. Note that the Marist poll finds that among rural voters, Trump’s approval has sunk to almost parity, 46–45, which is just stunning given historical rural support for Trump. And the CNN poll found that more than a quarter of voters who approve of Trump say his policies have increased costs on them, and 41 percent of those who approve of him say it’s likely we’re going into a recession next year. So I don’t know, Matt, when the tariffs start biting more, does he start to lose more support from the base, or not?

Gertz: I think we’re going to see a slow decline as people in the base realize what his policies are doing to them. If you’re a Fox News host, your every incentive is going to be to downplay potential impacts of those tariffs, both on their viewers and on support for Donald Trump, because their audience is made up of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters; those will be the people who will be the last to abandon him if they ever do. But when we at Media Matters listen to, for example, call-in shows from right-wing radio hosts, people like Sean Hannity, what we started hearing is more and more frequently people calling in and saying, These tariffs are bad for my personal business. What’s going on? When is he going to make the deal so that we don’t have to start laying people off? I think we are going to end up seeing an “emperor has no clothes” moment here, where more and more of the public sees the impact that his policies have on their pocketbooks and are not willing to accept it.