TRUMP’S HONEYMOON MAY BE OVER ALREADY

…This is “Mr. Twitter”

 

The shine has come off of Donald Trump’s apple.

 

Trump holds his first news conference since the election

 

What an interesting day in Washington.  Donald Trump has had a press conference where he tried to tell us that he is making arrangements that will fit with the spirit of the laws about removing his conflict of interest issues.  This will be done by putting his kids in charge of running Trump’s vast operation.  He is saying that he has signed all the papers where he won’t have anything to do with running the company. 

But all the constitutional lawyers that were asked about what he is doing were saying, “That is not in the spirit of the laws.”

 

As a proof of how bogus Trump's statements are, at the end of the press conference, Trump just couldn’t shut up.  He just had to say that if, after he serves as president, if he talks to his sons and if he’s not happy with how they ran the Trump operation, he would then tell them: “you’re fired!”   In other words, Donald J. Trump, will still own his company and he says he will fire his sons if they don’t run the company as he approves. 

 

That is not removing his conflicts of interest. 


Trump also had a high powered lawyer come on to the conference stage who told everyone that the “emoluments clause in the US Constitution did not mean that people paying to stay in a Trump hotel would not be payments against that clause”.  But that is only his lawyer’s opinion, and other lawyers say that anytime someone gains profits by customers spending money at a sitting president’s business, that’s "against the emoluments clause".  Trump now says he will donate all the profits from his foreign investments and hotels to the US Treasury.  But what about all of the profits from Trump’s US holdings?

 

Now, on another subject, I was wondering when the shine would finally start to "dull" on the Trump apple.

 

Well, if you ever follow the nation’s polls, you have probably heard of the poll run by the Quinnipiac University.  The Quinnipiac Poll is one of the most accurate and well respected national polls.

 

As the latest polling information goes, it looks like the Trump honeymoon is almost over, or at least it’s headed in the wrong direction.

 

Now, we all know that Trump was voted in as the most unpopular president-elect in modern history.  While the polls in late November had showed Trump’s favorable rating rose from 34% to 44%, that number has quickly dropped back to 37%, which is about where he stood for much of his campaign.

 

This new poll from Quinnipiac University suggests that Trump has reverted to his pre-election standing, with Americans having major concerns about his temperament .  Also about the direction in which his presidency will lead the country. Trump’s latest continued controversies seem to have put him right back where he was before he won the election.

 

Quinnipiac is the first high-quality pollster to poll on Trump twice since the election. His 37% is now tied for Trump’s worst favorable rating in a poll since his election. And of a majority of those asked, 51% now have an unfavorable view of Trump.

 

Likewise, the Quinnipiac poll shows a drop in confidence in Trump across the board. Although 59% were optimistic about the next four years under Trump in November, today that number is down to 48%. While 41% thought he would be a better leader than President Obama, now it’s only 34%.  While 52% thought he would help the nation's economy, it’s now down to 41%.  While 40% thought his policies would help their personal financial situation, it’s now down to 27%.  While 53% thought he’d take the country in the right direction, it’s now down to 40%.

 

You get the idea. There are similar drops in views of his honesty (42% down to 39%), his leadership skills (56% down to 44%), his compassion for average Americans (51% down to 40%), his levelheadedness (38% down to 31%) and his ability to unite the country (47% down to 39%).

 

But it gets much worse.  At the bottom, Quinnipiac asked respondents whether they thought Trump’s behavior since the election made them feel better or worse about him. Although “better” won out in November at 36% to 14%.  That whole number has been flipped. Today, 28% say they feel worse about Trump since Election Day; just 23% feel better.

 

But what about how they feel about Trump’s Twitter account.  

 

Clearly people still are not enamored with Trump’s social-media habits and fight-picking; by a 2-to-1 margin of -64% to +32%.  They think "yes" he should give up his personal Twitter account as president by +59% to -35%.

 

Some people like the election analysts think that because Trump won, that had vindicated his brand of politics and the many decisions he made on the campaign trail.

 

But that’s not how it works today.  Trump squeaked his way into the White House with a very narrow win in which he only got 46% of the nation's vote, and he only won the states he needed to win by less than a single point.  He also lost the national popular vote by the largest number ever, and the voters have told the pollsters that they have huge reservations about him.

 

Those people had set aside those reservations a bit after he was elected.

 

But this poll suggests that those concerns have returned, and are as real as ever.

 

And that’s basically bad news for any Trump mandate with only 8 days left before he’s sworn in.

 

Stay tuned, as the one pollster that was the very first to sat that Trump was going to win in November, he is now predicting that eventually, “Donald J. Trump will be impeached by a Republican Congress because they would prefer a President Pence, whom they think they can really trust.”

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017