Trump's Brutal Poll Numbers

Voters don’t see greatness. They see CHAOS.

Folks,

I know there are a lot of claims on your time and your support. But these are remarkable times, and we are very much in this together. And I’m immensely grateful for your support.

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For Donald Trump, April is, indeed, the cruelest month. The poll numbers are ghastly. The memes are worse.

Happy Friday.

Chinese meme mocking… well, you know.

Springtime for Bullies

We’ll get to the polls in a moment but we need to highlight the ugliness first. I’m in radical agreement with Philip Bump, who writes that Trump’s targeting of Chris Krebs was the “most explicit display of Trump's vengeance to date.”

Let’s not pretend that another bright red line has not just been crossed. In plain sight. As a photo-op.

Here’s the story: Back in 2018, Trump appointed Krebs to head up the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to address foreign threats to elections.

Krebs was widely respected and accomplished his mission: there was no foreign interference in 2020. The election was safe and fair. And Krebs said so. That, of course, was his cardinal sin and Trump never forgave him.

Within hours, he announced Krebs’s firing on Twitter, insisting that claims about the security of the election were false and flew in the face of available evidence. Again, the opposite was true; it was Trump’s claims that failed to comport with the evidence, much less reality.

In many ways, Krebs was the first of many casualties in Trump’s Big Lie, which culminated in the violent attack on the Capitol. On Tuesday, Trump announced that he was removing Krebs’s security clearance and ordered the Justice Department to “launch a fishing expedition, seeking out any scintillas of illegality in which Krebs or CISA might theoretically have been engaged.”

It was as explicit a manifestation of Trump’s vengeful worldview as anything we’ve seen since his second inauguration. There remains no evidence at all that CISA or Krebs engaged in any systematic effort to violate the law or even to combat disinformation because of ideology rather than factuality.

Liz Cheney was one of the few Republicans still willing to call Trump out for such an egregious and petty abuse of power:

“This Is Why Dictatorships Fail”

Trump’s attack on Krebs came the same week he was tanking the world economy by whim. All of this, writes Anne Applebaum, should remind us why the authors of the Constitution separated powers — because they knew what tyranny looked like.

The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.

This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia, windows closed for the sake of secrecy, they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

You can read the whole thing in the Atlantic [Gift Link].

“Unconscionable”

The other BFD: Supreme Court Sides With Migrant Trump Administration Wrongly Deported - The New York Times

The Supreme Court on Thursday instructed the government to take steps to return a Salvadoran migrant it had wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

In an unsigned order, the court stopped short of ordering the return of the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, indicating that courts may not have the power to require the executive branch to do so.

But the court endorsed part of a trial judge’s order that had required the government to “facilitate and effectuate the return” of Mr. Abrego Garcia.

The vote was 9-0, which was encouraging.

Less encouraging was the apparent vagueness of the language which required the Trump Administration only to “facilitate” his return, while declining to order it to actually “effectuate” it.

Is this merely a semantic quibble? Or a substantive and tragic loophole? We’ll find out, because the outcome is binary: Does Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia return or not? Will the Trump Admin comply, or will they use vagueness of language as a way to delay, fudge, and ultimately ignore the order?¹ And what happens if they do?

The biggest disappointment here is what the court did not say. The trial court judge had said that the Trump Admin’s claims that Abrego Garcia was a gang member were based on “a singular unsubstantiated allegation.”

“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” she wrote, “and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived.”

In rejecting a request for a stay of her order, Judge Paula Xinis called his arrest "wholly lawless."

"Defendants seized Abrego Garcia without any lawful authority; held him in three separate domestic detention centers without legal basis; failed to present him to any immigration judge or officer; and forcibly transported him to El Salvador in direct contravention of the INA," Xinis wrote in her order. "Once there, U.S. officials secured his detention in a facility that, by design, deprives its detainees of adequate food, water, and shelter, fosters routine violence; and places him with his persecutors."

A federal appeals court also rejected Trump’s attempt to have the order overturned, calling the government’s position, “unconscionable.”

“The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process,” the court ruled. “The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.”

It was, indeed, “unconscionable” — and the Supreme Court should have said so.

BONUS: For the latest developments, follow Joyce Vance here: “The Abrego Garcia Case: A Quick Update.”

Trump’s Polling Nightmare

There are lots of indicators that voters are souring on Trump’s chaotic regime. But I wanted to share the new numbers from Navigator Research that came out this morning. The key takeaways:

• After last week’s tariff announcement, Trump’s economic approval has dropped precipitously, now tied for his worst ever in Navigator tracking since 2018. His overall job approval rating has also declined.

• “The broad tariffs last week brought this feeling to a boiling point, with 58% of Americans saying Trump's policies are contributing to high costs and 72% saying they are contributing to volatility in the stock market.

• Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) say Trump’s policies are contributing to volatility in the stock market. Most Americans' exposure to the stock market is through retirement accounts, where nearly 50% of Americans have long-term savings. This sentiment is shared by a majority of Americans across party lines – including 60 percent of Independents and 62 percent of Republicans.

Want more #s?

Via Bloomberg:

Friday brought a fresh signal that consumers were queasy even before Wednesday’s policy shift. US consumer sentiment tumbled to the second-lowest level on record in a University of Michigan survey, as inflation expectations soared to multi-decades highs. That result was based on interviews from March 25 through April 8, before the change in tack on tariffs.

**

Finally, here are the key takeaways from new polling from Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank:

• Voters’ pessimism is increasing, particularly on the economy.

• Roughly 14% of 2024 Trump voters are soft and movable.

• Trump is most vulnerable on breaking his promises on costs and the state of the economy for the middle class.

• A defense of government programs must focus on specific, popular items like cancer research, veterans’ programs, Social Security benefits and staffing, nuclear energy safety, and other tangibles.

• Elon Musk is box office poison.

• Digital privacy and giving Musk and DOGE access to government data is a possible sleeper issue.

Voters don’t see greatness. They see CHAOS.

Friday dogs

Eli went to the vet this morning. Not his favorite thing. But he’s hanging out in the library now.

1. Friday afternoon: Trump admin defies judge’s orders to detail steps for wrongly deported man’s return - The Washington Post

The Trump administration did not comply with a federal judge’s order setting a Friday morning deadline for officials to lay out steps for the return of a Maryland man mistakenly deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador, calling it “impracticable” to adhere to a time limit set hours after the Supreme Court affirmed much of the judge’s previous order for the man’s return.

Justice Department lawyers instead asked to be allowed to have until Tuesday to provide the information, eliciting a rebuke from the judge, who gave them until 11:30 a.m. Friday, two more hours past her original deadline. In a response, the Justice Department said it is unable to provide the information in such a short time.