RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-approval-rating-hits-record-high-in-new-poll/

Well into his third year in office, President Trump’s approval rating has reached a record high, according to a poll released Monday.

Trump’s approval rating hit 44 percent in the new NPR/NewsHour/Marist poll, the highest level at which it’s been recorded in any mainstream opinion poll with the exception of a a July 7 Washington Post poll that recorded 47 percent approval.

Respondents were surveyed from July 15 to July 17, in the days following the president’s tweet instructing four freshman congresswoman of color to “go back” to their home countries.

Since taking office Trump’s approval rating has hovered between 35 and 43 percent in the Marist poll.

The poll, which included responses from 1,336 adults, also found that Trump has won over a small but significant group of independents in the last month. His approval rating among independents increased from 35 percent last month to 42 percent in the latest poll. Meanwhile, the percentage of respondents who said they will definitely vote against Trump remained unchanged from last month at 53 percent.

While Trump gained ground among independents, Democrats remain unpopular with the group: 43 percent of respondents in the poll said they believed Democrats would take the country in a positive direction if given the opportunity, compared with 46 percent who said the party would lead the country in a negative direction.

“Independents are on the fence overall,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College. “They’re not willing to grant President Trump reelection, and yet they’re not persuaded by Democrats at this point.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/no-one-really-wants-to-send-her-back/

Don’t exaggerate the significance of raucous chants.

The president can be very entertaining, but I don’t pay much attention to political rallies, including his famously raucous ones.

For the faithful, the rallies are fun spectacles, like rock concerts or ball games. I don’t think they can be taken too seriously, except perhaps as a gauge of the president’s support. Not in lieu of polls, but in conjunction. And with healthy skepticism: The polls have a history of undercounting Trump supporters, but the ardor of the Trump base on display at the rallies should not be confounded with national enthusiasm for the Trump presidency — though it may signal more openness to it, especially in light of the increasingly radical alternative.

Which brings us to Wednesday night’s Trump rally in Greenville, N.C., and the ginned-up crowd of Trump fans chanting “Send her back!” That was in reference to Ilhan Omar, who is a naturalized American from Somalia, a radical at the crowded junction between Islamists and leftists, and a member of Congress from Minnesota’s fifth district — the deep-blue Twin Cities area that teems with Millennials and Somali immigrants.

All good populist demagoguery needs a villain. President Trump hardly has the market cornered on this. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton studied Alinskyite community organizing. The organizer, a self-styled renegade against The Establishment, is instructed to avoid abstractions when picking an opposition target. You’ve got to make it personal, to polarize the adversary in stark terms. Trump’s persona is to hit back harder than he is hit. No surprise, then, that he is a practitioner of this demagogic art, since he is also the Left’s No. 1 target.

Most Republican villains the Left selects (the Bushes, Mitt Romney . . .) respond by trying to prove they’re not really villains. This is a futile strategy. The demagogues making the accusation already know it’s not true. They do it because it always works. Or at least it used to. It’s different with the president, who is from the Leo Durocher School: “I come to play. I come to beat you. I come to kill you!” Trump vexes the Left because he revels in the mud wrestle. Sure, he craves admiration, but he wants to win more, and he doesn’t in the slightest mind winning ugly. In that the Left must see a lot of itself, but that doesn’t mean it has figured out an effective response.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274383/chancellor-merkel-supports-radical-squad-joseph-klein

The so-called “squad” – Democrat Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) – received strong support from German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She blasted President Trump’s tweets attacking the radicals, following in the footsteps of the highly partisan resolution passed by the Democrat-controlled House that condemned President Trump’s tweets as “racist.”

“I distance myself from this decidedly and stand in solidarity with the women who were attacked,” Chancellor Merkel said. “Those [Trump’s statements] are sentiments which are very much in opposition to my impressions [about the U.S.], which I strongly believe in, and it is something that undermines America’s strength,” Chancellor Merkel added.

Evidently, what disturbed the German chancellor the most was President Trump’s suggestion in one of his tweets that the squad members should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” All four squad members are U.S. citizens. Only one of them, Rep. Omar, was born outside the United States in Somalia and came to this country from a Kenyan refugee camp as a child.  Trump supporters at a campaign rally last Wednesday chanted “send her back,” referring to Omar after the president had singled her out for sharp criticism. Chancellor Merkel, along with much of the mainstream media and other Trump critics, have dwelt on this one Trump tweet, and on the rallygoers’ “send her back” chant that President Trump subsequently criticized. They chose to largely ignore or downplay the factual substance of the president’s critique.

President Trump’s beef with the squad is not grounded in their color, race, or sex. If it were, he also would be singling out other women of color in Congress, including presidential candidate Kamala Harris, with racist and sexist attacks. The president, at times with inartful rhetoric to be sure, has tried principally to focus on the anti-American, anti-Semitic rhetoric delivered by members of the squad. He singled out Omar in particular for her anti-Semitism and hatred of the Jewish State of Israel. There is plenty of evidence to support the president’s accusations.