The following column by Robert Schlesinger was posted on the U.S. News and World Report website August 18, 2017:
Charlottesville doesn’t figure to arrest Trump’s declining poll numbers with his base.
How low can President Donald Trump go? I don’t mean in the moral context but rather the colder calculus of public approval and political power. After this week’s enraging equivocation about white supremacists rallying in Charlottesville, Virginia we may find out.
Trump already seems intent on testing the lower boundaries of his support. As of Thursday afternoon, his job approval rating was a hair under 39 percent, according to HuffPost’s average of surveys and had been beneath 40 percent for three weeks. He’s never approached 50 percent approval and he’s had majority disapproval for five months and counting. Nothing he’s done in his seven months in office, or this week especially, could lead one to believe that he is trying to augment that figure. Instead he seems more interested in rallying his hardest-core supporters, everyone else be damned. Continue reading “The Incredible Shrinking President”