One year ago this week, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States. He entered office with a net approval rating of +5 in the FiftyPlusOne.news approval rating aggregate. Despite a tumultuous first term — which ended with the president posting his worst-ever numbers after the January 6 insurrection — voters, it seemed, were willing to give him another shot.
They are no longer willing to give him that chance. Trump sits at an -16 net job approval on average today, down from +5 on his first day in office. His 21-point drop is the worst first-year performance, in the eyes of public opinion, of any president’s first term going back to at least 1948. If you compare the last year to other second-term presidencies, Trump’s is still the worst first-year performance of any president in the modern polling, with one exception: Richard Nixon (who was consumed by Watergate and other national crises at this point in his term).
Either way, Trump is in historically bad company.
As The New York Times reported this week, Trump’s support among key groups he persuaded to vote for him in 2024 — notably, young, Black, and Latino voters — has now sunk below levels measured in the run-up to the 2020 election (which Trump lost to Joe Biden by 4.5 points in the national popular vote)... [snip]
The president has lost the most ground among the groups that put him back in the White House. (our emphasis)
As the weeks go by, it's become harder and harder to find something "good" to begin with. Increasingly, we've been relying on polling showing how historically unpopular the Malignant Fascist and his malevolent policies and enablers are. That the polls consistently show this erosion of support tells us that a growing majority is rejecting the MF's toxic, un-American politics. A would-be dictator who loses "the consent of the governed" is, in time, destined to fail.
"... The behavior of ICE and CBP agents reminds me of the Fascist blackshirts who arrived in trucks, armed with clubs, knives, guns, and castor oil, to subjugate towns in early 1920s Italy, before Benito Mussolini declared dictatorship.
"Like the original Fascists, ICE agents want their violence to be public. They want the world to understand that anyone who challenges their authority and occupation of public space can be 'taught a lesson,' humiliated (parading their victims around in their underwear was a Fascist specialty, too) or eliminated.
"The United States has its own history of using organized public violence in neighborhoods and cities. We need only think of the role of violence in sustaining the Jim Crow South (which was a regional form of authoritarianism) and the lynchings of Black people that could happen at any time, and then the shootings of civilian protesters during the Civil Rights movement.
"Yet those around the world who watch the behavior of DHS operatives may make comparisons to military juntas abroad and other foreign regimes. Shooting protesters is standard practice where war is waged on domestic populations and even peaceful public dissent is considered a form of terrorism. People were shot for protesting in Belarus in 2020; in Turkey, anti-regime protesters have had chemical agents sprayed directly at their faces or in their mouths.
"In Iran, women were shot in the face and the eyes during the 2022-2023 protests, leaving many of them blinded. As Firouzeh Nahavandi has written, such acts “are part of a political rhetoric that is echoed throughout Iran’s long history, in which aiming for the eyes symbolically signifies stripping someone of their personal, political capital.”
"In all of these cases, state security forces are given license to kill and torture to shut down the sights most threatening to them: people showing the world through nonviolent protests that they do not fear the regime and will not lose their civic courage no matter what happens. This is the message that Minnesotans are sending to the world right now." (our emphasis)
Our fascist regime's approach to public humiliation and "manufactured cruelty" appears to be altering mug shots to falsely show arrested protesters crying.
We take heart that resistance is growing and that Minnesotans and their Democratic leaders are fighting back against our homegrown fascists. (Bravo to the FBI supervisor in Minneapolis who resigned after DOJ HQ told her not to investigate the Renee Good murder. Contrast that with AG Bondi extorting Minnesota.) We need to show them in our words and actions that they're not in this alone.
"Days into President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, a cryptocurrency billionaire posted a video on X to his hundreds of thousands of followers. 'Please Donald Trump, I need your help,' he said, wearing a flag pin askew and seated awkwardly in an armchair. 'I am an American. … Help me come home.'
"The speaker, 46-year-old Roger Ver, was in fact no longer a U.S. citizen. Nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus” for his early evangelism for digital currency, Ver had renounced his citizenship more than a decade earlier. At the time of his video, Ver was under criminal indictment for millions in tax evasion and living on the Spanish island of Mallorca. His top-flight legal defense team had failed around half a dozen times to persuade the Justice Department to back down. The U.S., considering him a fugitive, was seeking his extradition from Spain, and he was likely looking at prison.
"Once, prosecutors hoped to make Ver a marquee example amid concerns about widespread cryptocurrency tax evasion. They had spent eight painstaking years working the case. Just nine months after his direct-to-camera appeal, however, Ver and Trump’s new Justice Department leadership cut a remarkable deal to end his prosecution. Ver wouldn’t have to plead guilty or spend a day in prison. Instead, the government accepted a payout of $49.9 million — roughly the size of the tax bill prosecutors said he dodged in the first place — and allowed him to walk away.
"Ver was able to pull off this coup by taking advantage of a new dynamic inside of Trump’s Department of Justice. A cottage industry of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants with close ties to Trump has sprung up to help people and companies seek leniency, often by arguing they had been victims of political persecution by the Biden administration. In his first year, Trump issued pardons or clemency to dozens of people who were convicted of various forms of white-collar crime, including major donors and political allies. Investigations have been halted. Cases have been dropped.
"Within the Justice Department, a select club of Trump’s former personal attorneys have easy access to the top appointees, some of whom also previously represented Trump. It has become a dark joke among career prosecutors to refer to these lawyers as the “Friends of Trump.”... (our emphasis)
As the Malignant Fascist's DOJ threatens blue states to knuckle under to their demands, they collaborate with the white collar billionaire criminals to make the charges or convictions go away. In addition to being the most fascistic regime in American history, it's also the most transparently and overwhelmingly corrupt.
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