This is an adapted excerpt from the April 22 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Every single day, President Donald Trump digs this country deeper and deeper into his mess. On Wednesday evening, we learned that the secretary of the Navy, a guy named John Phelan, had been fired by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in the midst of a war that has not ended.
The United States has directed an enormous number of its naval assets to Iran. According to the Pentagon, we are conducting an active naval blockade there.
Phelan’s firing comes just three weeks after the Army chief of staff was also fired.
But it also comes at the tail end of a truly awful 24 hours for the White House. Even grading on a curve, for what has been, generally speaking, a pretty rough year for this president, Trump had an absolutely brutal day on Tuesday. It was one of those days that, in hindsight, can look like a political inflection point.
Even grading on a curve, for what has been, generally speaking, a pretty rough year for this president, Trump had an absolutely brutal day on Tuesday.
According to a horrendous series of polls, the number of people who support this president is getting smaller by the day. The most favorable of the surveys for the president was from The Economist/YouGov, which showed Trump with a 38% approval rating. That was as good as it got.
As we often say on “All In,” when the favorability numbers begin regularly starting with a 3, that is when the wheels start coming off the whole political project.
An NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll had the second-best numbers for Trump, with his approval hovering at 37%. In that same poll, though, half of all respondents said they “strongly disapproved” of the job he is doing.
Reuters/Ipsos had its own poll, showing Trump at 36% approval. That puts it somewhere in the middle of the results we got.
Polls from Angus Reid Global and Strength in Numbers/Verasight both showed something similar, with Trump at 35% approval.
An Associated Press-NORC survey found Trump’s approval even lower, at 33%, meaning just one-third of voters are on board with the president’s agenda.
Rounding out the bottom is a poll from the American Research Group, or ARG, with Trump at just 32% approval.
Now, this last number appears to be an outlier. But there is clearly a trend here: All the numbers are in the 30s.
It is a losing streak rivaled only by the New York Mets. (Sorry, Mets fans, I love you.) But you get the point: People are unhappy.
Just for comparison, at the lowest point of Trump’s popularity during his first term — in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — his approval rating was 34%.
Which means, according to some polls, he is already less popular than when he led a violent insurrectionist mob to try to overturn the results of the election he lost. And even if you trust the rosiest assessments of his presidency, it appears he is rapidly approaching that point.
Trump’s situation is starting to echo the lame-duck period of George W. Bush’s second term. After he launched two disastrous wars, the previous Republican president’s approval rating started to dip into the mid-to-high 20s.
I’m not sure if something like that is even possible in this current polarized environment. But if things continue on this same track, who knows?
There are already signs that voters are fed up. According to that Verasight poll I mentioned, 55% of the country — a clear majority — supports impeaching Trump.
There is obviously room for some skepticism there. Polls are not perfect, and they are just a snapshot in time, but you do not need a graduate degree in political science to see what is happening here.
Trump started a disastrous war for no discernible reason, which has left more than 6,000 human beings dead and sent gas prices skyrocketing. Right now, they are averaging more than $4 a gallon nationwide. That is up nearly $1 from a year ago.
And there is little sign this problem is going to resolve itself anytime soon. Because Trump has no leverage to get Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. And with the United States still blockading the strait, Iran has made it clear that it will keep it closed.
Now, this reality is better than the ethical, human, financial and strategic costs of active war. But there does not seem to be any kind of meaningful progress outside of Trump’s announcement of an indefinite ceasefire, either.
We are just kind of stuck in this geopolitical holding pattern with no end in sight, and people don’t like it.
We are now also seeing the second-order effects of higher gas prices, with the rapid rate of inflation when it comes to food prices. According to a new analysis from Bloomberg, the cost of food increased almost 80% year-over-year last month.
That is not a great result from the guy who promised to bring down prices “on Day 1.”
We are just kind of stuck in this geopolitical holding pattern with no end in sight, and people don’t like it.
It also does not help Trump’s case that he is constantly posting online like a maniac. Now, to some extent, that was always baked in. It is kind of taken for granted now that no one likes how the guy comports himself online.
A common refrain during the last election was “Mean Tweets and Cheap Gas.” As in, we will take the former if it means we get the latter. But now we don’t even have cheap gas. It is just the mean tweets.
To some extent, I think the White House saw this coming, which is why they have pulled the emergency rip cord ahead of the November midterms. Trump’s plan for surviving all of this was an insidious rigging of the election maps in Republicans’ favor in Texas, North Carolina and other states. But even that didn’t work.
First, California countered the Texas redistricting plan by having voters overwhelmingly support rewriting their own maps to be more favorable to the Democrats.
Then, on Tuesday, Virginia did the same thing. Unlike in the red states, the voters themselves chose to fight fire with fire. And while there are some pending legal challenges — specifically a Virginia court trying to block the certification of the referendum — Democrats will likely net four new seats in the state when all is said and done.
The midterms are still a few months away, and the president has almost three years left of his term. Anything can happen. But if Tuesday serves as any indication, Trump is in for a rough go of things.
Allison Detzel contributed.
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