SearchRecent comments
Democracy LinksMember's Off-site Blogs |
"I still trust him"...New polling demonstrates that most voters see President Donald Trump as a dangerous politician and view his leadership style as dictatorial. In Truth Social posts earlier this week, Trump seemed to confirm that point of view, expressing disdain for the press and demanding firings at news companies that published data showcasing voters’ negative views of his presidency 100 days into his second term.
Poll: Majority of Voters View Trump as “Dictator” Who Threatens Democratic Norms
In a post on Monday, Trump called such surveys “FAKE POLLS FROM FAKE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS,” citing longtime conservative pollster John McLaughlin, who has described polls showing Trump’s negative approval ratings as fraudulent. (Notably, McLaughin has counted the president among his clients, including during the 2024 presidential campaign.) Trump further claimed that the surveys were weighted wrongly and did not include enough Republican voters — something that would be tough to replicate across multiple polls consistently showing majority disapproval among voters. He then demanded disciplinary action against those media organizations, including criminal inquiries. “These people should be investigated for ELECTION FRAUD,” Trump wrote in his post, referring to the press as “Negative Criminals.” “They suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and there is nothing that anyone, or anything, can do about it,” Trump added, before calling media “THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE” — an epithet he frequently hurls against journalists who publish factual reporting on him and his policies. Numbers from a PRRI survey published last week demonstrate that most voters view the president’s behavior as alarming. The poll gave respondents two options to choose from, asking whether they believe Trump is a “strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness,” or “a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.” Only 44 percent viewed him as a “strong leader,” while a majority of respondents, 52 percent, called him a “dictator” who posed a threat to the country’s democratic norms. Even a significant percentage of the president’s own base said Trump was dangerous, with more than one in six Republican voters (17 percent) describing him as a dangerous dictator. The poll also showed that voters are opposed to Trump theoretically expanding presidential power. Seventy-seven percent of respondents said Trump should not suspend the midterms in 2026 if he is unable to “get our country out of crisis in the next year,” while just 17 percent said he should take such an action. And only 20 percent believed that, “because things have gotten so far off track, we need a president who is willing to break some laws if that’s what it takes to save the country,” while 76 percent of respondents disagreed with that viewpoint. Despite his dismal 100-day polling numbers, Trump suggested to a crowd of his supporters in Michigan on Tuesday that he would continue to impose his far right agenda, even if it meant disregarding judicial rulings against his executive actions. “Nothing will stop me,” Trump told his loyalists.
READ FROM TOP.
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
|
User login |
no to trumpism....
Nan Levinson, How Trump Plays the Media
POSTED ON APRIL 29, 2025
BY TOM DISPATCH
I was recently at a demonstration in New York City (my second in these weeks), part of the latest set of national protests against Donald Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk, and crew and, among so many other things, their urge (in climate-change terms) to devastate this planet. That rally was once again simply huge, and I stood for 45 minutes or so watching my co-demonstrators march by me, packed into 42nd Street, which couldn’t be wider, chanting things like “No ICE, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!” I also copied down some of the homemade signs they were carrying. (Making such signs definitely seems to be a sign of the times.)
Here are just a few that caught my eye: “Resist like it’s 1938 Germany”; “Deport Trump, not Students”; “Trump to planet: Drop Dead”; “First they came for Kilmar, then Mahmoud, then Rumeysa, and I did not speak out. Then they came for me” [That one was modernized from a famed passage of Pastor Martin Niemöller, who first backed and then opposed the Nazis and ended up in a concentration camp]; “Turd Reich”; “Trump’s mother was an immigrant”; “Ikea makes better cabinets”; “MAGA is a death cult”; “Think while it’s still legal”; “The Earth doesn’t have four years”; “Democracy, not monarchy”; “Is there a vaccine for stupidity?”; “3rd term, Sing-Sing”; “No more Dogey Business”; “This is what autocracy looks like” (with, of course, images of Trump, Vance, and Musk); “Get your tiny hands off our Democracy!”; “Lose the tiny dick(tator)”; and an older woman carrying a sign that said, “Hands off social security!”
And those were just a few among what must have been thousands of signs. And yes, a surprising number of the demonstrators were indeed of a certain age. A fellow aging demonstrator I chatted with offered me this comment: “Gaza could stop every university campus in the country, but not this! Where are the kids? It should be their job, not ours!” And it was true that, on average, the demonstrators weren’t young — although some certainly were youthful. Let me just add that, in my hometown, the media coverage distinctly left something to be desired (perhaps reflecting media anxiety about Trump & crew). The New York Times (the paper version of which I still read) carried an article on page 28 about the national rallies that day, but not one focused on the major rally in its hometown, which it barely mentioned. And yet, there was room on its front page that very same day for a Trump tariff piece headlined “Italians Fear American Palates Will Settle for ‘Italian Sounding.'”
And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson take you deep into a media world in crisis in an era when such outfits could all too literally find themselves under the gun. Tom
Seven-and-a-Half Propositions for Journalism in the Age of TrumpThe Good and the Bad in Media Coverage Now
BY NAN LEVINSON
It’s not a good time to be an American journalist. Or a consumer of American journalism. Or, for that matter, even a skimmer of the headlines crawling across American phones.
Donald Trump is suing media corporations and targeting individual journalists on social media. The White House press office is playing musical chairs at its press conferences and withholding press pool reports it dislikes. Republicans in Congress have called on public broadcasters to defend themselves against “systemically biased content” and are trying to claw back their funding. Large newspapers are choosing to tailor what they write to stay in the government’s good graces and smaller ones are being forced to do the same. Sources are increasingly reluctant to go on the record and violence against journalists has become a punchline. Even student newspapershaven’t escaped the threats.
READ MORE:
https://tomdispatch.com/