Donald Trump has put himself in a hole……
WILLIAM KRISTOL @ The Bulwark….
Wanted to drop you a note. The slippage we anticipated for Trump’s standing in terms of public opinion from the shutdown is coming to pass.
The slippage is the worst kind—the slow erosion of support from key blocs: swing voters (independents and suburbanites) and those who put Trump over the top (blue collar white men and Republicans over 60).
It’s been registering in a cross section of polling data, not just one poll. Trump’s job approval rating is down to 31 percent among independents in Gallup. His approval ratings in Rasmussen are down from the 48-49 percent range of late last year to the 43-44 percent level of the past week or so. The Marist data for PBS shows a drop of 10 percent in job approval among Republicans and a decline of 11 percent among white evangelicals and 17% among suburban men.
And Trump continues to enrage the Dem base while this erosion in his base continues to progress. Blue collar white men being turned off from Trump shouldn’t surprise anyone, for they know the difficulty of living paycheck to paycheck. This, plus the skew of the tax cut package, spells political trouble for Trump long term, especially if a slow down, much less a recession, looms in 2020.
As an aside, it’s fair to ask why hasn’t this decline in the polls registered more with pundits and pols. I wonder if it’s because Gallup is not doing daily tracking polls anymore? In any case, Trump’s decline in the polls is significant precisely because slow declines are like weight gain. The quick gain of 5 pounds on a vacation can be easily shed. The slower gain of 10 pounds over a long winter can be brutal to reverse. As can the slow and steady erosion of your political standing.
President Trump “broke a fundamental rule of modern politics Saturday when he outlined a new plan to get his border wall and re-open the federal government: Never split your own party,” NBC News reports.
“The basic idea is to give 1 million immigrants — 700,000 so-called Dreamers who were brought to the country illegally as children and 300,000 refugees facing expiration of their ‘temporary protected status’ — a three-year shield from deportation in exchange for $5.7 billion in funding for the wall.”
“While Republican leaders on Capitol Hill praised his leadership, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, readily agreed to bring his proposal up for a vote on the floor next week, conservatives were quick to criticize the president for offering “amnesty” to undocumented immigrants.”
The Hill…
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said Democrats have backed themselves into a corner in negotiations to end a record-long partial government shutdown, suggesting any compromise with President Trump would anger the party’s base.
“Any compromise with President Trump Is going to look like a surrender. And Nancy Pelosi made it very difficult when she said that a wall is amoral. Because once you say something is a moral, how can you possibly compromise?” King said on John Catsimatidis’ radio show.
“The fear is, among the Democratic leadership, if they make any agreement with President Trump it’s like compromising with the devil….
The Transport Security Administration (TSA) on Saturday closed a security checkpoint at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport over a lack of staffing.
The TSA said that due to “excessive” employee callouts, it shut down BWI’s Checkpoint A at 5:35 p.m., according to NBC Washington.
The absences come as the partial government shutdown approaches its fifth week. The TSA has reported a heightened rate of employees calling in sick across the nation amid the shutdown….
Huffington Post…
As the partial government shutdown entered its fifth week, President Donald Trump proposed a trade Saturday: Give me $5.7 billion in border wall money, and I’ll agree to protecting refugees and immigrants who came here as children for three years.
Most Democrats dismissed the offer immediately Saturday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) shot down the deal to extend protections for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration proposal as a “non-starter.”
In a statement issued before Trump’s speech, Pelosi said the idea was a “compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable and in total, do not represent a good faith effort to restore certainty to people’s lives.”
Trump, meanwhile, falsely presented the proposal as something he had worked out with Democrats….