Good morning! First, thank you all for the kind wishes, they worked. My procedure went perfectly, and I’m on the mend. For the next few days, I’ll be typing with nine fingers and one enormous, overachieving bandage, so please forgive any delays or typos that slip through.
That said, there’s a strange comfort in watching Donald Trump’s numbers tank. For all the bluster, the flags, and the performative rage, the man simply isn’t that popular. His base remains loyal, yes, a hardened core that would follow him over a cliff and straight into the sea, but they’re not growing. They’re shrinking, aging, and drifting toward irrelevance in the broader electorate.
That, historically speaking, is what separates him from the truly dangerous fascists he likes to masquerade as. Hitler and Mussolini didn’t just seize power through intimidation; they did it with adoration. Their regimes were built on mass mobilization, mythmaking, and a collective delusion of national rebirth. Millions believed. Millions cheered. That belief gave them permission to dismantle democracy in daylight.
Trump, on the other hand, governs from the bunker. His approval ratings have never cracked 50%, and his second-term disapproval hovers in the mid-50s, an emperor without a majority. He’s an authoritarian who can’t fill the balcony. The rallies are smaller, the faces older, the slogans more desperate. He’s trying to rule a democracy that no longer wants him, and he knows it.
That’s why he’s rigging the game instead of playing it, turning gerrymandering into a survival strategy, not a governing one. When you can’t win the crowd, you redraw the audience. His mapmaking crusade isn’t about ideology; it’s about oxygen. Every crooked district line, every voter purged from the rolls, every precinct shuttered is a tacit admission that the movement is shrinking. He isn’t expanding democracy; he’s fencing it off like a failing golf course.The danger isn’t that he’ll sweep the nation in a wave of populist fervor, he won’t. The danger is that he’ll try to subvert what he can’t win. His is a project of minority rule, of coercion dressed as patriotism, of dismantling institutions that deny him the applause he craves. It’s fascism without the fanfare, brittle, joyless, and haunted by its own lack of mandate.
The polls offer some comfort. The man who dreams of Mussolini’s balcony is staring out at an empty piazza. History tells us that’s when the shouting gets louder, the propaganda more hysterical, the violence more erratic. But it also tells us this: authoritarianism without mass belief eventually collapses under its own weight.
Trump’s weakness isn’t just showing up in the polls, it’s being broadcast on the world stage in 36-point font. His Asia trip, meant to be a victory lap, has become a slow-motion farce: scripts too big to read, bluster too small to convince. While he mumbles about “historic” trade deals with Cambodia and Thailand, U.S. allies are quietly walking away.
In a stunning rebuke, Canada has reportedly struck a deal with China to drop its 100% tariff on electric vehicles, opening the door for BYD, the Chinese EV juggernaut, to flood the Canadian market with cars that cost a fraction of American models. The symbolism couldn’t be sharper: a country once bound by North American unity now cutting its own deal with Beijing while Trump flails abroad. The supposed champion of American manufacturing has managed to make the U.S. less competitive and more isolated in a single trade cycle.
In Georgia, South Korea is furious after ICE agents allegedly attacked Korean workers at a battery plant, an incident Seoul’s president described as causing “grave damage” to relations. Allies who once humored Trump now treat him like the diplomatic equivalent of an uninvited wedding guest: unpredictable, loud, and likely to start a fire.
Democrats are finally playing offense, led by Hakeem Jeffries and Gavin Newsom, using every available lever, from redistricting to Prop 50 monitoring, to counter Trump’s rigged-election agenda. At least 22 state attorneys general are preparing a massive lawsuit over Trump’s SNAP cuts that could deprive 42 million Americans of food benefits. It’s a moral contrast as stark as any in modern politics: one side fighting to feed the hungry, the other trying to starve them.
And yet, amid all of this, Trump remains fixated on his image, not the economy, not diplomacy, but his reflection. He’s still the sickly salesman trying to hawk “greatness” to a world that’s stopped buying. Canada, mild-mannered, polite, perpetually apologetic Canada, is now more popular with Americans than the U.S. president himself, by nearly 60 points in net favorability. That’s not just a statistic. It’s a diagnosis.
Trump’s latest shutdown gambit, refusing to extend SNAP benefits to 42 million Americans, isn’t just cruel, it’s economically illiterate. The administration is sitting on legally available contingency funds but claims its hands are tied, a legal fiction so flimsy it wouldn’t survive Judge Judy, let alone a federal court. Analysts across the spectrum agree: Trump could extend the benefits, he’s simply choosing not to. And the cost of that choice isn’t just measured in empty stomachs, it’s measured in lost jobs, shuttered stores, and weakened local economies.
Because every SNAP dollar circulates back into the community, creating up to $1.80 in economic activity, Trump’s “starve the poor” strategy isn’t just inhumane; it’s recessionary. The people he’s starving are also the customers, grocers, and workers who keep small-town America alive.
And while Americans line up at food banks, Trump just cut a $40 billion sweetheart deal with Argentina, funneling taxpayer money into foreign agriculture while U.S. soybean farmers and cattle ranchers watch their markets collapse. Argentina gets subsidies and export guarantees; U.S. producers get tariffs, neglect, and betrayal. This isn’t “America First.” It’s America Last, unless your name is Bezos, Mellon, or Icahn.
So, when we ask why his approval numbers are in freefall, the answer’s staring us in the face. You can’t call yourself a populist while making people go hungry. You can’t wrap yourself in the flag while selling out the farm belt to Buenos Aires. And you sure as hell can’t claim to be strong when your own people are the ones being starved, priced out, and betrayed. Trump’s America is a hollow slogan, printed on an empty can of beans.
So true! He/MAGA cannot win elections legitimately, so they’re using every implement in their box of seditious tricks to impose minority rule on an unwilling (and patriotic) American majority.
Apparently, of all eligible voters in 2024, about 32% voted for Trump, 31% voted for Harris, and most of the rest didn’t vote. Hispanic and under 30 voters have turned on him in large numbers. His 32% is even less.
The “base” screams, its propaganda outlets overwhelm social media, billionaires and institutions kiss his ring, and legacy media gives more attention to Trump and his “base” than to the consequences of what his regime is doing.
We the people are ahead of the “elites”. We will not go down with MAGA’s leaky ship!
Wow-Mary. Your writing is so powerful and moving.Thank you!