The latest New York Times-Sienna poll has Donald Trump’s overall approval rating down to 37%, which combines with 59% disapproval to make him 22 points underwater. Sixty-five percent of the population, including 73% of “Independents,” disapproves of Trump’s arch-criminal war on Iran. Trump is 31 points underwater on his handling of the economy, with 64% disapproving of that.
No pollster would dare ask the question of course, but the chances are good that “happy” or at least “relieved” would trounce “sad” if Americans were asked how they would feel if Trump drew his last breath.
Having paid reasonable attention to US current events and society since the late 1970s, I’d have to say that I’ve never seen a US-American more and passionately loathed by his fellow countrypersons than Donald J. Trump – and here I include Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy as contenders for that title.
Impolitic
It’s incredible how indifferent Trump seems to his remarkable unpopularity.
He couldn’t care less.
Trump recently said that the declining financial situation of the American people — a key part of what got him elected in 2024 (along with the racist, nativist, and sexist hate he tapped in his virulent Amerikaner base) — does not concern him right now. Trump also recently said that the federal government can’t afford Medicare, Social Security, and “day care” anymore because it has to pay for wars.
Those are incredibly impolitic, unpopular things to say.
And now he has ordered his Internal Revenue Service and his Department of Justice (the latter under the control of his personal attorney Todd Blanche) to create a wildly menacing and corrupt scheme whereby US taxpayers are to grant vast sums to the January 6 putschists he pardoned while he and his family are immunized from civil penalty for past, present, and future tax crimes (more on this below). It’s hard to imagine that finding approval among anyone outside the core Trump MAGA cult.
Yes, They Care About the Mid-terms
“Wait,” one might ask, “do the outcomes of this year’s mid-term elections simply not matter to Trump, his regime, and his party? Do the Trump forces and party really not care about polls indicating a possible Democratic Party takeover of the US House of Representatives and even the US Senate?”
My sense is that they care. Trump doesn’t want to be impeached for a third time (and possibly more times) by a Democratic Party-controlled US House. And while the risk of removal following impeachment is low because it requires a two-thirds vote in the badly malapportioned, right-tilted US Senate, there is an outside chance that the depth and degree of the discomfort his criminally insane conduct is creating in the populace could create a crisis so grave that a sufficient mass of Republican Senators could at long last feel compelled to remove the demented and maniacal monster, whose mental deterioration is accelerating (more on this below).
Trump has repeatedly defied and attacked the US Constitution and is only half-joking when he talks about running again in 2028, so the fact that he is constitutionally limited to two terms may not be much of a factor in explaining his curious readiness to stoke mass hatred of his “stable genius” self.
No Intention of Permitting Normal Elections
So why this seeming brazen indifference to mass citizen opinion as the midterms draw closer?
Madness and delusion aside, it’s because the Trump regime and party have no intention of letting normal bourgeois-democratic midterms occur this year. The Trump phenomenon and regime(s) are an ongoing rolling fascist coup that has been underway since the fall of 2016, continuing during the lame Weimar Biden interregnum.
Look at what the Trump47 regime has been doing:
+ deploying the Department of Justice (DOJ) to gather up state-level voter data to curate voter rolls in the Republi-fascist Party’s favor in the name of “nationalizing our elections.”
+ Regularly sowing doubt about the fairness of American elections to justify subverting, canceling, postponing, or refusing to honor the outcomes of the midterms.
+ Propagating the myths of mass noncitizen voting and doubling down on the multiply disproven Hitlerian lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
+ Raiding county election offices to seize election materials supposedly proving the big election lie and the need for Trumpian “nationalization.”
+ Threatening to have ICE officers patrol election sites.
+ Announcing the creation of a Republican National Committee “Election Integrity Army” composed of legal teams, “poll watchers,” and vote suppressors to advance the claim that the Democrats can only win by rigging the elections. (Chances are good that many of the January 6 thugs rewarded by his IRS-DOJ deal will ne be enlisted in this “army” under the direction of lunatic deniers like Heather Honey, an “election researcher” and martial law enthusiast tapped to be Herr Donald’s “‘election integrity” official at the Department of Homeland Security.)
+ Attacking Black voting rights with the Trump-fascist Supreme Court’s decimation of what was left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, setting off a wave of racist, hyper-partisan gerrymandering to eliminate majority Black and Democratic Party US House districts across the South.
+ Securing total dictatorial control over the Republican Party by using primary elections and other means to purge the party’s last remaining non-Trump politicos in state government and Congress.
+ Intimidating Colorado’s meek Democratic Party governor Jared Polis into commuting the prison sentence of Tina Peters, an election denier who had been serving nine years in state prison for tampering with voting systems in support of Trump’s 2020 election lie. (As Mesa County Clerk, Peters used a security badge not her own to criminally grant access to voting data to an associate of the deranged right-wing Mr. Pillow founder and election denier Mike Lindell. Polis’s cave to Trump is a green light to other local, county, and state election operatives and officials looking to rig future elections on behalf of the RepubliNazi Party.)
+ Launching an insane war on Iran that may be intended in part to spark (or allegedly spark) terrorist attacks on US-Americans that Trump can use as a pretext for declaring a state of emergency to cancel or refuse to honor the outcomes of the mid-terms (and now the fascist regime may be setting up a war on Cuba).
+ Holding a nine-hour orgy of Christian Fascism on the National Mall last Sunday. This White House-backed, evangelical-dominated event promoted the revanchist notion of the United States as “one Christian nation under God” and heralded the monumentally corrupt, multiply accused rapist and pedophile Trump as the nation’s divinely ordained leader.
The Dismal, Unpopular Dems
Also worth mentioning as context for the Trump regime and party’s brazen, seemingly impolitic defiance of public opinion in an election year is the continuing unpopularity of the capitalist-imperialist Democratic Party. While Americans are rightly dissatisfied with both of the nation’s two ruling-class/capitalist-imperialist parties, the aforementioned Times-Sienna poll finds that they are actually and less dissatisfied[1] with the one of those two parties that has gone fascist (the ex-Republican Republicans) despite that party’s leader and his regime’s horrific conduct[2].
The deep, richly deserved unpopularity of the dismal, dollar-drenched capitalist-imperialist and fascism-enabling “hollow resistance” Dems is part of the context in which Trump, the Trump regime, and the Trump party feel free: (i) to behave in ways contrary to the quaintly conventional way for politicians and elected officer-holders to be popular and seem legitimate in a bourgeois democracy the US – that is to advance policies and govern in a fashion meant to grow and sustain mass approval, and (ii) to subvert, repress, and perhaps even cancel or refuse to honor the outcomes of the 2026 mid-terms since the unpopularity of the Democratic Party reduces the likelihood that masses would rally to oppose the rolling neo-Confederate RepubliKlan coup (2016-202?) that frankly seeks to eliminate all political opposition to the Amerikaner fascist Trump regime and its heirs.
Postscript: Trump Posts Himself Nuking Earth
Oh, by the way, this from The Daily Beast:
“The president of the United States can’t stop posting AI slop. Donald Trump spent his Sunday afternoon firing off a barrage of bizarre AI-manipulated videos and images on Truth Social, while peppering his feed with bitter jabs at his foes. In a series of bonkers posts, the elderly president, whose cognitive health has come under mounting scrutiny, shared AI-generated images of himself as the commander of an imagined space station or spaceship, overseeing an imaginary war. In one of them, he is depicted sitting at a futuristic command center overlooking Earth from space and pressing a red button. One of the monitoring screens in the background shows a massive mushroom cloud towering into space, accompanied by the words ‘TARGET DESTROYED.’ The 79-year-old grandfather of 11 posted the AI image twice, the second time with the words ‘SPACE FORCE’ superimposed over it, in a reference to the branch of the U.S. military established in 2019 during the first Trump administration.”
Which raises the following question for US-Americans: what on Earth are we doing letting this deranged, depraved, demented, disgusting and debased maniac — “the most dangerous criminal in human history” (Noam Chomsky’s accurate description of Herr Trump in January of 2020) — continue to sit from one day to the next atop the most lethal superpower in the world history?
What actually might spook me more than the fascist Trump regime, party, and base is all the seemingly decent people not in the Trump base[3] who are drifting through life and history as if nothing more is required of them than maybe voting for dismal Dems every two or four years and going to a No Kings rally once every five months.
Endnotes
+1. “To all US registered voters — ‘In general, would you say that you are satisfied or dissatisfied with the [neoliberal-authoritarian/bourgeois-democratic – PS] Democratic Party?’: Satisfied: 26%; Very Satisfied: 5%; Dissatisfied: 70% (44 points underwater)…To all US registered voters — ‘In general, would you say that you are satisfied or dissatisfied with the [genocidally racist and fascist- PS] Republican Party?’: Satisfied: 33%; Very Satisfied: 14%; Dissatisfied: 64% (31 points underwater).”
+2. For my own imperfect attempts to at least partially catalogue, describe, and contextualize the soul-chilling exterminist fascism at the heart of this truly horrific regime, situation, and moment, see Paul Street, “A Declaration of Independence From Trump’s Fascist America,” Common Dreams, July 4, 2025; Paul Street, “What Would it Take?,” CounterPunch, May 15, 2026.
+3. The remarkably durable cohort of disproportionately white, male, rural, and evangelical folks who seem ready to back Trump no matter how high prices go as long as the regime is disenfranchising Black people, sweeping Brown folks into concentration camps, killing Muslims and Latin Americans, attacking higher education, threatening Obama, calling female reporters and politicians “pigs” and “bitches,” and generally “owning the [supposedly Radical Left] libs.” No love for imperialist Hillary Clinton here but “deplorable” fits.
