[ Posted Tuesday, June 6th, 2017 – 17:25 UTC ]
That'd have to be my sum-up of Trump's polling numbers since the last time I looked at them. Trump has lost roughly a point in job approval, and has lowered his own floor to 39 percent from 40 percent. But once the initial slide happened, Trump has had one of the most stable polling periods he's ever seen -- his polls for the past few weeks are almost perfectly flat, with both his job approval number and his job disapproval rating falling within a range of a single point for the whole time. For Trump, that's an achievement.
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[ Posted Monday, June 5th, 2017 – 15:25 UTC ]
Kellyanne Conway is right -- the media obsesses over presidential tweets from Donald Trump. What she fails to understand, though, is that there's a very good reason for this obsession. Trump tweets make news because they are newsworthy. If Trump tweets were bland and boring repetitions of White House policy, pre-vetted by the communications team, then it's likely nobody would pay any attention to them. But they're not. They are, as one interviewer pointed out to Kellyanne this morning, Trump's preferred method of communication to the American public. And what he's got to say makes news because nobody else in the administration can speak for Trump.
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[ Posted Friday, June 2nd, 2017 – 17:45 UTC ]
Yesterday, Donald Trump finished off a two-week stretch of diminishing America's standing in the world by announcing he was pulling out of the historic Paris climate agreement. In Trumpian terms, this means we're all covfefeed now.
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[ Posted Friday, May 26th, 2017 – 17:22 UTC ]
President Donald Trump went on a tour of foreign countries this week, and World War III did not erupt. So things could have been worse.
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[ Posted Thursday, May 25th, 2017 – 15:35 UTC ]
Today is the second of four special elections for the House of Representatives caused by Donald Trump naming House members to administration positions. The first was in Kansas, where the Democrat lost (but by a much closer margin than anyone expected). We've been through the first round of voting in another of these special elections, down in Georgia. More on that in a moment. The final race is in South Carolina, and is considered the longest longshot of the bunch for Democrats to pick up (all four of these were Republican-held seats). Today, Montanans go to the polls to elect their one at-large House member.
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[ Posted Monday, May 22nd, 2017 – 16:41 UTC ]
President Donald Trump has only just begun his first road trip outside the United States, and he's already "exhausted," according to one of his own advisors. This may or may not be true, since anything either Trump or any of his spokespeople say at this point has to be taken with a grain of salt -- especially considering the "exhausted" comment was given as an excuse for a Trump gaffe (more on that in a bit). But this week's calendar for Trump seems to have been constructed on the theme of: "Any Trump campaign promises left unbroken? Well, let's see how many we can break in a single week!"
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[ Posted Friday, May 5th, 2017 – 17:51 UTC ]
Instead of using his last name (which he loves), why not use a diminutive version of his first name (which he apparently hates) instead? Add in his last name's initial, and it becomes: "DonTcare." Personally, we feel this perfectly captures the entire Democratic argument, using only eight letters: Donald T's "don't care what's in it, don't care how many of my voters it will screw, as long as Congress passes some bill or another so I can brag about it!" health care plan. DonTcare. Rolls off the tongue, don't it? Well, typing it does take some getting used to -- but without that second capitalization, it'd be a lot harder to read. Trump DonTcare. And while we certainly can't claim credit for coining the term, we do encourage others to use it freely -- it even saves characters in tweets!
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[ Posted Thursday, May 4th, 2017 – 17:02 UTC ]
In all the news articles triggered by the House passing the Republican "American Health Care Act" (A.H.C.A.), one quote prominently stood out. From an article written by David Weigel in the Washington Post came this extraordinary quote:
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[ Posted Wednesday, May 3rd, 2017 – 17:13 UTC ]
Congressional Republicans have now positioned themselves firmly between a rock and a hard place on healthcare reform. This would be highly amusing if it weren't for the seriousness of the subject matter, which could accurately be described as a life-or-death subject for millions. Republicans now have the choice of voting for a bill which is massively unpopular with the public (increasingly so, as a matter of fact), or admitting to their own voting base that they've been flat-out lying about the evils of Obamacare for the past eight years. That's a tough choice, because no matter what route they take, it is bound to cause anger among the voters -- at this point, it's just a question of which particular voters (and how many of them) will be massively disappointed.
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[ Posted Tuesday, May 2nd, 2017 – 16:51 UTC ]
I haven't done one of these three-dot columns in a while (as always, in homage to the late, great columnist Herb Caen), but the flood of news tidbits flowing from the White House is relentless, so I thought it was time to catch up on some of the fresh idiocy coming from the Oval Office.
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