Believe me, I’m happy as hell watching Li’l Duce‘s support erode with each passing day. He’s on a fast track to becoming one of least-approved presidents ever. That 35 percent of American voters whom he has leaned on for ten years, that rock hard base, is wearing away faster than the ratty carpeting in Caligu-lite’s office when he was being courted to host The Apprentice.
BTW, the lowest approval rating for any president came about in 1952 when Harry Truman could only muster a scant 22 percent of Americans thumbs-upping his job performance. His party got smushed in that fall’s elections.
Fingers crossed.
A similarity between Truman and Trump’s non-support (likely the sole similarity between the two anyone could ever find): each was prosecuting a war the general public just didn’t get. Truman’s successor that fall, an army general, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, for pity’s sake, swiftly got the US out of Korea. Will President Pritzker pull an Ike?
Toes crossed, too.
Peaceniks?
Anyway, we all, those of us on my side of the fence, are busy patting ourselves on the back as The Mad King’s cult withers away. As well we should.
Yet, there’s a nag. This house-of-cards-tumbling bodes something awfully disturbing. See, those who enrolled in the MAGA gang flocked to the orange arsonist largely because they’d lost faith in pretty much every American institution. Congress, they believed, couldn’t get anything done. All politicians are corrupt. All scientists are on some corporation’s payroll. Doctors are in the pocket of Big Pharma. University professors are commies. Union stewards are mob goons. School teachers want your kids to change their sex. All the news on TV and in the papers is fake. The country’s being overrun by illegal immigrants and they’re getting everything for free.
They believed, as Bernie Sanders has so astutely observed, the whole system was broken and they were getting screwed.
This holy land, they held, was going to hell in a handbasket and the only man who could stop the slide was Donald J. Trump. If they believed in nothing else, at least they believed in something. Him.
Now, though, more and more of them are losing faith in their savior even as he tries to re-position himself as that other Savior.
Jesus Christ!
For many MAGA-ites, the above now-deleted social media image is the last straw. They could excuse anything — Trump’s pussy-grabbing, his mocking of the handicapped reporter, his insulting of anybody who got in his way, his family’s slurping at the trough, his betrayal of America’s allies, his fomenting of the January 6th insurrection, his coziness with Vlad Putin, his stupid Iran War, jeez, the list could go on forever. Well, not quite forever. Nobody fucks with the Jesus, to borrow a line from The Big Lebowski.
Nobody. Not even Trump.
The man whom they trusted to save them from…, from…, well, from everything, from every evil in this rotten country, from transexuals in schoolgirls’ bathrooms, from fake news, from illegal Mexicans living high on the hog, from college professors trying to groom your kids, from feminists who want to force your wife to have an abortion, from USPS employees, from NPR, from liberals, from Democrats, from everybody and every thing that’s not them, now is losing their trust
And therein lies the problem. Once MAGA loses faith in Trump, they’ll have faith in nothing.
They’ll become nihilists.
And that’s a scary crowd. Nihilists can find no more meaning in life. They eschew morality. They trust no one, not even friends or family. They become depressed, even suicidal. They’re desperate to escape reality. They become violent. They want to tear everything down because, well, why not?
If Trump continues to lose his 35 percent, that gang’s gonna turn even uglier than it already is.
Fasten your seatbelts, friends.