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The Problem Causing Trump’s Supporters to Turn on Him

As the 2026 mid-term elections approach, the Felon has a huge problem - actually several Problems - that are causing even some his Kool-Aid drinking cultists to turn against him, namely high gasoline prices here at home in America.  The polls are showing the Felon far under water with historic levels of disapproval.  Even Fox News is unable to ignore the horrific poll numbers which are turning the Felon into an albatross around the necks of congressional Republican candidates. The New Republic reports on this reality: 

An intriguing pattern is developing in Fox’s polling of the Senate races this summer: Just about all the Democratic candidates are significantly outrunning the favorability of their party. While the party’s standing—which is pretty bad—can’t be shrugged off, Fox’s polls do show that most of these Democrats are not getting dragged down by association with the party.

Meanwhile, all these polls show [the Felon] Trump deeply underwater—including in states he won by double digits. To wit: Fox’s latest poll in Ohio finds Democrat Sherrod Brown leading GOP Senator Jon Husted by eight points, 53 percent to 45 percent. That’s despite the fact that only 42 percent view the Democratic Party favorably. The rub is that only 44 percent see Brown as too close to the Democratic “establishment,” while 55 percent do not. Turns out a lot of voters who don’t like the party support Brown.

Surrounded by bootlickers and sycophants, the Felon is likely being shielded from information he does not want to hear.  Indeed, this week the Felon more or less told Americans to stop whining about gas prices and to simply pay more for gas, ignoring, of course, the fact that the higher prices are directly due to the Felon's war of choice with Iran.  A second New Republic piece looks specifically at the gas price revolt:

[The Felon] President Trump has hit the highest national disapproval rating on gas prices in recorded history, as 79 percent of Americans—and a whopping 52 percent of Republicans—feel negatively about how he’s handled skyrocketing gas prices. 

“No president has been hated more when it comes to gas prices,” CNN’s Harry Enten said during a Friday segment. “79 percent ... that is the highest disapproval rating for any president on record.”  Former Presidents George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, who each had their own struggles with gas prices, never eclipsed a 75 percent disapproval rating on the issue. 

“Donald Trump takes the cake as these $4-plus gas prices continue to give us pain at the pump. The American people are taking their anger out on the President of the United States,” Enten said.

The poll’s party line breakdown is even more devastating, as 52 percent of Republicans disapproving may put Trump-backed candidates at risk in their November elections as they have to answer for his decisions—especially in swing states. 96 percent of Democrats disapproved, along with 85 percent of independents. 

These are startling numbers that [the Felon] Trump can’t convincingly blame on decisions Biden made three years ago. Gas prices are high—and will continue to be high—because Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started bombing Iran and Lebanon, and Iran closed the crucial Strait of Hormuz in response. That’s why your gas is $4 for the third time this year—something else that has never happened before.

Another factor that could harm Republican candidates, especially in tight races like the one for Virginia's 2nd congressional district is the Felon's complete lack of concern for America's service members as underscored by his statements about conditions on the aircraft carrier, Abraham Lincoln.  Norfolk is home to the world's largest naval base and there are many service members and their families across the Hampton Roads region. In close races, service members and their loved ones could decide that the Felon and his party are no friends to them. The above New Republic piece looks at the Felon's uncaring statements:

[The Felon] President Donald Trump denied reports Friday of horrific conditions onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln—and suggested that the U.S. servicemembers should stay at sea for even longer.  

Trump offered a shockingly callous response while taking a question about the aircraft carrier that’s been deployed since November. 

Asked whether he believed that the servicemembers had been deployed for “too long,” Trump had a similarly heartless reply. “No, no, no. Not nearly long enough,” Trump said. . . . Clearly, the president couldn’t care less about U.S. servicemembers or their families. 

One can only hope this callousness will cost candidates like Jen Kiggans who puts the Felon above her constituents.

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Republicans Are Trying to Hide Their Health Care Cuts

The United States is the only advanced industrial nation without some form of universal health care coverage/access, instead leaving American citizens to either get coverage through their jobs - typically at high cost - or at the mercy of the rapacious for profit health insurance like United Health Care. The Affordable Care Act ("ACA") sought to improve access to coverage, but the Felon and his bootlicking congressional Republicans are making cuts to support for the ACA and throwing millions off of Medicaid. Compared to European nations where life expectancy is still rising, in the Felon/GOP's America, life expectancies are falling, particularly in red states (the difference in life expectancy in say Massachusetts versus West Virginia is nothing short of shocking). Only in America are average citizens treated as disposable garbage while the ultra-rich are showered with massive tax-cuts.  With the mid-term elections approaching, voters need to realize the cuts are about to get worse, cynically timed to take effect after the mid-term elections.  Obviously, the GOP views much of its base as too stupid to realize they are getting screwed over yet again so that the very wealthy can live ever more opulent lifestyles. A main editorial in the New York Times shouts out about the Felon/GOP's insidious cuts.  Here are highlights:

One of the federal government’s great achievements this century was making health insurance affordable to millions more Americans. In 2010, nearly 18 percent of people under 65 lacked insurance. By 2024, the rate had fallen below 10 percent, thanks to the Affordable Care Act and later legislation that built on it.

[The Felon] President Trump and congressional Republicans are working to dismantle that achievement. They have effectively cut subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces, making it harder for people who do not receive insurance through work to afford a plan. This year, the subsidy cuts led three million people to lose their health insurance. In Ohio, nearly a third of previous marketplace enrollees lost their insurance.

The situation stands to worsen next year. In addition to reducing the marketplace subsidies, [the Felon] Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans enacted sweeping cuts to Medicaid, which expanded under the Affordable Care Act. They will take effect after this year’s midterm elections. (Yes, that timing is deliberate.) By 2034, the combined cuts will most likely erase about half of the gains from the Affordable Care Act, causing 14 million Americans to lose insurance.

Politicians from both parties have talked up affordability in the run-up to this year’s elections. Republicans, however, are taking deliberate steps to make health care less affordable. Many middle-class and poor Americans will struggle — even more — to afford important medical care as a result.

Americans have good reasons to be disappointed in their government. Progress on health care, imperfect though it was, represented a positive counterexample of the government working to genuinely improve people’s lives. The president and Congress are trying to ruin that success story.

Republicans’ attacks on affordable health care have taken two forms: one more passive, the other more direct.

In the passive approach, [The Felon] Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans allowed the expiration of enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces. The Obama administration and congressional Democrats created the marketplaces for people who fell through the cracks. These people did not receive coverage through their jobs, and they were not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

In 2021, President Joe Biden and Congress increased the size of the subsidies, but they set them to expire in 2025, which mitigated their impact on the federal debt. . . . The federal debt is a genuine problem, having soared in the 21st century relative to the size of the American economy. But taking away people’s health insurance is not the answer. Repealing [the Felon's] Mr. Trump’s foolhardy tax cuts, which benefit mostly the wealthy, would have a bigger fiscal effect than his health insurance cuts.

Those health insurance cuts led premiums and deductibles to spike this year. As an example, a middle-income, middle-aged couple with two children could see their premiums more than double, costing an additional $3,500 a year.

In the more direct approach to cutting health care coverage, Republicans targeted Medicaid, the program focused on the poor and disabled. Last year, the federal government enacted what Republicans call a work requirement. In reality, it is a paperwork requirement — one that forces Medicaid enrollees, most of whom are working or have a valid reason for not working, to file repeated documents proving they have a job or a valid exemption.  . . . About two in three enrollees who will lose health insurance should, in fact, be eligible for it, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated.

Arkansas enacted a version of this policy before the federal law passed, and it was a failure: Work force participation did not rise, and eligible people lost their insurance because of paperwork problems.

The Affordable Care Act was a triumph of government, and it is justifiably popular. Mr. Trump and other Republicans once promised to repeal the law, but they have largely stopped making such statements. Instead, they have sought to weaken the law — partly out of an ideological aversion to government, partly to finance tax cuts for the wealthy — and hope that voters do not notice.

Democrats should not let the president get away with this subterfuge. They should make the health insurance cuts a central piece of their midterm campaign and, as important, offer voters a vision that includes other improvements to the nation’s costly, rickety health care system, both to continue expanding access and to reduce costs. The Affordable Care Act also happens to be a model on costs; it meaningfully slowed growth in health care prices over the past decade.

Congress should be looking for next steps, not moving backward. The Affordable Care Act demonstrated that progress is possible.

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Trump Wants to Cut Taxes for the Rich. Again.

The federal deficit has hit an all time high, with a disproportionate amount of the debt piled on under the Felon's two regimes. So what does the Felon and his billionaire sycophants want to do? Give even more tax breaks to the wealthy, of course, further pursuing the Republican Party's effort to create a new Gilded Age, with even more tax burden shifted to the less than wealthy. It's all part of the GOP's long established reverse Robin Hood agenda. Should more tax cuts for the wealthy be enacted,  the deficit will balloon even more, likely driving up interest rates and making things more expensive, not more affordable. Decades of evidence shows that tax cuts for the wealthy never pay for themselves and that "trickle down economics" has been a fraud since the Reagan era. But in the up is down and down is up alternate reality of the GOP and far right, why worry about facts and objective reality.  Meanwhile, the super wealthy, who put lower taxes above all else, are spending millions on the mid-terms to elect pro-tax cutting Republicans to Congress.  Concerns about bankrupting America are nowhere on the radar screen.  A piece at The New Republic looks at this latest round of irresponsible tax cut for the wealthy proposals.  Here are excerpts: 

It’s election time, so the White House, according to Bloomberg’s Katy O’Donnell and Caitlin Reilly, is weighing whether to give the rich more tax breaks. Republicans! They just can’t help themselves!

Cutting taxes on the rich is a uniquely unpopular idea. Since 1939, Gallup has been asking, “Do you think our government should or should not redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich”? In 1939, 54 percent said “should not” and only 35 percent said “should,” even though the Great Depression was raging and the New Deal was well along. Since 1939, though, the should nots have been falling and the shoulds have been rising. Today, a 52 percent majority say the government should redistribute wealth by taxing the rich heavily, and a 47 percent minority say it should not.

If you put the question in a manner more appetizing to moderates—do the rich pay their fair share?—61 percent say no, according to an April Pew Research Center poll. Fully 81 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners also say no, along with a not-inconsiderable 41 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners.

Given these realities, the White House, if it endorses a tax cut, will try to sell it as a middle-class tax cut. The Democrats have tax-cut proposals of their own that target lower-income people. I’ve explained previously that I prefer the alternative approach of cutting payroll taxes at the low end and eliminating the Social Security tax ceiling at the high end

On Tuesday, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow, who held that post during Trump’s first term, discussed on Fox Business the two tax proposals Trump is contemplating. One is to index the capital gains tax, and the other is to exempt from capital gains tax home sales below $2 million. (Currently the exemption goes up to $500,000.) The first of these is a more obvious giveaway to the rich. The second mimics the Obama administration’s strategy of shielding the haute bourgeoisie when it hikes taxes on the rich. . . . . In Trump’s version, the context for cutting taxes for the haute bourgeoisie is a tax cut for richer folks, too.

The dialog between Kudlow and Hassett conveyed that particular air of unreality characteristic of Fox World. (It was on Kudlow’s Fox Business show, which is called Kudlow.) Kudlow began by noting that the Congressional Budget Office had just projected this year’s budget deficit to be $2.1 trillion, up from February’s estimate of $1.9 trillion. “The budget deficit for the first ten months of the year is $1.8 trillion,” Kudlow said. “I’m not sure I understand why.”

Kudlow was baffled because he actually believes, contrary to 45 years’ evidence, the GOP’s propaganda that tax cuts pay for themselves. They do not. The tax cuts in last year’s budget reconciliation bill, for instance, slashed federal revenue by an estimated $570 billion.

In Fox World, as opposed to the real world, it is not thought illogical to follow a lamentation about government insolvency with a plea for tax cuts. Kudlow cited a McLaughlin & Associates poll that said 62 percent of voters approved of indexing the capital gains tax to inflation. . . . . Why not index capital gains taxes, too?

Because capital gains are already taxed at a lower rate than labor income. The top capital gains rate is 20 percent. The top labor-income rate (which is also too low) is 37 percent. Get back to me when you’ve eliminated that differential—and when you’ve also eliminated the “angel of death” loophole that lets assets escape capital gains tax when passed on to heirs—and we can talk. But if we ever do index capital gains like we do income-tax brackets, we’ll have to figure out some way to capture lost revenue—because remember that $2.1 trillion deficit? You don’t want to make it $3 trillion. According to the Yale Budget Lab, indexing capital gains would cost $170 billion over 10 years if it applied only to assets purchased after 2025, and almost $1 trillion if it applied to all assets.

Then there’s the distributional impact. People making less than about $100,000 would receive virtually no benefit, according to the Yale model (and would likely pay more income tax to cover the lost revenue). People making more than about $3 million, on the other hand, would save $350,000 in taxes. If McLaughlin & Associates had bothered to furnish voters with that information, its poll results would have been quite different.

If Trump endorses these tax proposals, he’ll say they’re an affordability play and argue that lowering capital gains tax will encourage more people to sell their houses, thereby lowering prices. But Democrats should answer that these are just two more Trump giveaways to the wealthy, most especially the indexing of capital gains. There are many ways to reduce the cost of housing: zoning for higher density where appropriate; investing in infrastructure; eliminating tariffs on lumber, steel, and aluminum to lower construction costs; subsidizing low-income housing; and so on. Throwing money at millionaires and billionaires is the most regressive way conceivable to lower housing costs, and there’s no great reason to believe it would even work.

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