On the last full day of the Obama presidency and on the eve of President-Elect Trump’s inauguration, let’s look at where the new President starts in the public’s estimation. The answer is, Trump is really unpopular and has gotten more unpopular as the transition has gone on.
We have some new numbers.
Over the years one of the great pleasures of running TPM for David Kurtz and me is how many great young journalists have come through the organization, how we’ve been able to have some role in bringing their talents to the fore and the great careers they’ve gone on to at a whole slew of great news organizations like The Washington Post, Salon, The New Republic, The New York Times, NBC, CNN, ABC, Bloomberg, Buzzfeed, Propublica, Politico, Huffington Post, NowThisNews and just a slew of other pubs. What is a particular pleasure is being able to welcome one of our greats home.
Yesterday, I announced we were adding a new editor to our team as part of our expansion. David Taintor first joined TPM just out of college as an intern in the fall of 2010. We hired him as a full time staffer right out of his internship. And he worked his way up to reporter before leaving in 2013. We are now really excited, happy and lucky to be bringing him back as our new News Editor. David rejoins us from NBC News. He’ll join Catherine Thompson, David Kurtz and me as our team of editors going into this new phase of the organizations history.
David will be rejoining TPM in early February.
Trump plans to kill the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities and sell off the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
We’re now learning that President-Elect Trump wanted a full Soviet-style inaugural parade, with tanks, missiles and missile launchers. The Pentagon nixed that idea but agreed to a jet fighter flyover. In an interview published Wednesday morning Trump had spoken about his desire to hold military parades during his presidency. But this is the first sign he had tried to hold a Soviet style military parade for his inauguration.
If you don’t like Donald Trump and don’t approve of what he’s doing, rejoice. You’ve got a lot of company. We have another approval number out tonight, this one from Fox News of all places. Donald Trump’s approval number is 37%. 54% disapprove.
With Fox added, we now have a poll from each of the major TV networks. What is most notable is the level of unanimity. Fox (37%) ABC (40%), CBS (37%), CNN (40%), NBC (44%). Add in Quinnipiac (37%) and Gallup (44%) and you’ve got a simple average of about 40% approval, with the most recent polls both coming in at 37%.
The New York Times is out with a story tonight which is little short of astonishing on the eve of a presidential inauguration. From the Times article …
“American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.”
Just to state this clearly, that means that on the eve of Trump’s inauguration the nation’s top law enforcement and intelligence agencies are pursuing a counter-intelligence probe of contacts and payments between key members of his campaign and Russia. We have not been here before.
Here are a couple photos that will help put crowd size today in context, after the jump.
Let me share a few thoughts on this moment and what it portends in the days and years ahead. Optimism is not primarily a prediction but an ethic, a philosophy, a way of confronting the world. I know many people are not simply disappointed about today’s events but gripped by a deep apprehension and worry. This is natural, logical. What we are seeing transpire, because of the person and character of the man who is about to become President, is unlike anything any of us have seen in our lifetimes. Trump is a bully. He is not just ignorant but militantly ignorant. He is palpably driven by a need to dominate in every case. He has the most fragile of egos. His vision of leadership is one we find from strongmen in pseudo-democracies and soft dictatorships. His most driving needs are to be praised, loved and to dominate. All of these qualities, not simply in the abstract but in how we have seen them manifest in recent months, are wholly at odds with democratic leadership and the rule of law.