When
Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were president, liberal
Democrats opposed them with anger and vitriol. But there never was the kind of
scorn leveled against them that we now see with Donald Trump. The difference, I
believe, is respect. Past Republican presidents, like Richard Nixon, came in
for heated opposition from Democrats, but there was always a certain underlying
respect for the office of President that even the most avid liberals felt for
them. Now, all over America, in streets and in the media, one sees
demonstrations with banners claiming that Trump is “Not my president.” Millions
of people not only oppose Trump, they refuse to acknowledge his victory in the
presidential election. They refuse to respect him. I do not remember ever
seeing such opposition to a president. This is what I call “Virtual
Impeachment.”
It
is not just that Trump’s approval ratings are dismally low. Other presidents
have experienced very low approval ratings. But after six months, Trump’s
ratings should be an embarrassment to him. His current approval rating, according
to Gallup, is 34%. Other polling
firms have found similarly dismal figures for Trump. The weighted average from
data-centric website FiveThirtyEight—a tracker that aggregates surveys and
adjusts for quality, recency, sample size and partisan lean—pegged his
approval at just 37.2 percent Friday, August 25, 2017. That's just 0.6
percentage points higher than his all-time low in the tracker. Trump's
disapproval, meanwhile, stood at 56.8 percent Friday, according to
FiveThirtyEight. According to FiveThirtyEight's tracker, no president in the history of modern polling has had an
approval rating so poor at this point in his tenure,
Late-night
comedians have always made a living by joking about incumbent presidents.
Saturday Night Live has performed some brilliant skits lampooning Jerry Ford, George
W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and even Barack Obama. But never in living memory have
the spoofs and parodies carried such scorn as they do now with President Trump.
Watch the first fifteen minutes of Seth Meyers each night and you get a hilarious
take-down of President Trump and his colleagues. But it is not just Seth Meyers
doing the ridicule. Watch Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Trevor
Noah, and James Corden, and you will get a level of derision and disrespect not
seen with any other modern president.
Trump
hotly denounces the News Media. He claims that they are producing “Fake News.”
The problem is that not all in the News Media are liberals. It is surprising to
pick-up the paper in the morning and find Trump being criticized by Republican
columnists. People like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, and
Mona Charen, who are reliable conservative columnists, have been loudly
criticizing Trump and his administration. Television news shows tend to
highlight Trump’s many blunders, correcting his frequent misstatements and fabrications.
Internet sites such as Facebook seem totally obsessed with attacks on Trump. If
it were not for his blatant braggadocio, hyperbole, and mendacity, I would feel
sorry for him.
With
so many people feeling that Donald Trump is not their president, it is a kind of Virtual Impeachment. Trump is
experiencing a huge, tragic, lack of respect
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