What the polls say

I was always taught that even if you disagreed with the current presidential administration, you still showed at least a modicum of respect for the office.

After all, presidential elections come every four years, which is this country's built-in Constitutionally guaranteed revolution. If we didn't like a president, we could vote him out of office and try a different direction. An electoral uprising, as it were.

That was the genius of our Founding Fathers. We could change our leadership without anybody getting hurt, with the point being that you respected the office, if not the man, because if the president was successful, then the country was successful.

Donald Trump changed all of that, of course. His Make American Great Again (MAGA) philosophy of government was/is the theory (perhaps conspiracy theory) that a deep state (a hidden, camouflaged shadow government cabal that actually ran things). He was going to come in and drain the swamp. Tens of millions of voters, aggrieved (or motivated) by foggy perceptions of socialism and other assorted misinformation, voted for him.

We can measure presidential popularity – and thus a president's effectiveness –  through polling. The first known straw polls came in 1824 and they were basically regional and informal. By 1916 –  with World War I raging in Europe – the first national poll was conducted by The Literary Digest. Twenty years later, George Gallup conducted a poll using statistical survey methods, predicting that Franklin Roosevelt would win the election, which FDR did. The Literary Digest blew that one and hasn't been seen since.

And now we're here with polls for measuring everything. 

For the third time in this country's history, we have a president who is a convicted felon. The reason he hasn't been sentenced is because a friendly Supreme Court has ruled that he is immune from sentencing and thus is the only American who is above the law. Given that kind of permission, Trump has unilaterally imposed (without the consent of Congress, as instructed by the Constitution) illegal tariffs, illegal deportations of brown skinned people whose only crime is having brown skin), illegal acts of war on the high seas and alleged acts of pedophilia as suggested by the current revelations of the Epstein files so far released, where his name is said to appear at least 1,200 times. While the wealthy are receiving tax breaks, the common citizen is being buried by high prices for groceries and a stubborn inflation rate that is fueled by those illegal tariffs.

The polls are reflecting this. You can take issue with polls as much as you want, (dealing with numbers is tricky stuff) but I think they still reflect the beating heart of the nation.

So when the current polling shows Trump an approval rating of just 39 percent in CNN's Poll of Polls (an amalgamation of several independent polls), we can't help but feel the nation senses that it's on the wrong track. The Associated Press has Trump with a 36 percent approval rating. Other polls are hovering around the same numbers.

Trump is at 67 percent disapproval in his handling of the economy; 65 percent disapproval in healthcare; and 57 percent disapproval in his immigration policy. He's basically under water in every major issue.

We want a president to succeed. But we don't want incompetence in the office. We never have.