HOW WE GOT HERE: Compagno didn't have a clue!

TUESDAY, MAY 6, 2025

But then, there was what she said next: How in the world did President Trump ever get back to the White House? Why have his approval / favorability ratings stayed as high as they have?

His approval ratings may drop if The Attack of the Empty Shelves takes place. But for now, something like forty percent of respondents have said they approve of his first hundred days.

Those respondents have every right to their views. That said, numbers like those should be more than enough to keep Republican senators in line.

For those of us in Blue America, an obvious question arises. How in the world did we ever get here? More directly, why do so many people still support President Trump?

What keeps so many neighbors and friends supporting President Trump? For starters, it might be worth considering a basic fact about our politics:

Given the animal spirits which underlie our two-party system, it tends to be hard for presidents to drop below 40 percent.

It's possible to go lower than that, but it's fairly hard. As a rough approximation of what we mean, consider our presidential elections from 1900 on.

Franklin Roosevelt was elected four times. He won more 60 percent of the popular vote in just one of those elections

In 1936, deep in the Great Depression, he received 60.8 percent of the nationwide popular vote. In his next two elections, FDR was opposed by 44.8 and 45.9 percent of the people who turned out to vote.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson got 61.1 percent of the nationwide vote. That's as high as any presidential candidate ever went. 

President Reagan never reached 60 percent, not even when it was "Morning in America." President Eisenhower never reached 60 percent in his two landslide wins—and he was running as the genial general who had won World War II. 

If the empty shelves attack, President Trump's approvals may drop below 40 percent. But why do so many voters still approve of his job performance at this point in time?

As we start to seek an answer, consider what the Fox News Channel's Emily Compagno said. With that, we return to what Compagno said on last Tuesday night's Gutfeld! show. 

As we skillfully noted last Friday, Gutfeld! is a nightly, prime time, propaganda program. No, it isn't a comedy show—and it isn't "political satire."

Each night, producers assemble a panel of four enablers who will agree with every part of the program's mandated messaging. There's no sign that these flyweight guests actually know what they're talking about—but they do know what the talking-points are, and they're more than willing to serve.

There sat Compagno on last Tuesday's show. Plainly, the former head cheerleader for the Oakland Raiders didn't know what she was talking about—but she was quite willing to talk.

In this instance, she was talking about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was renditioned to a Central American mega-prison in violation of a standing court order. Compagno didn't seem to know what she was talking about, but she knew what stance to adopt.

The fellow's an "asshole," she thoughtfully said. As before, we offer this advice—fight your way through the word salad:

GUTFELD (4/29/25): Emily, Emily, Emily...Have the Democrats done anything in a hundred days? I can't think of anything other than whine and sing horribly.

COMPAGNO: Yes. The hundred days to the Democrats is like a complete fiction of the rest of our hundred days. So let's take the example that you just talked about, where you talked about an administrative error that needs to sort of correct someone's process, and I assume that you are meaning due process. 

But this person [Abrego Garcia] was someone who was already deported and then came back against—again, he was a recidivist illegal enterer in the country. And what I don't understand is this sort of wiping the slate clean that the Dems do when they are blurring out the signs on the White House and levying this guy, lifting him up as the "Maryland father." 

I don't quite understand why—it's as if their memory has only started from like two seconds in, so the conversation is just administrative. But the point was that this guy was a wife beating, violent, gang-affiliated asshole that kept coming into our country multiple times. 

Compagno seemed to have Abrego Garcia confused with someone else. No one has ever said that Abrego Garcia had been deported multiple times and just "kept coming into our country," but Compagno kept saying it now. 

According to the official record, Abrego Garcia entered the country illegally in 2011, at the age of 16. He lived in Maryland until his recent rendition to that mega-prison. 

There were no previous deportations. There was no repeated instance of his "coming back."

Given the endless focus on this case, it's hard to believe that a major news org would put someone on the air who still wasn't clear about such elementary facts. But this is the gruesome Fox News Channel—and Gutfeld! is one of the most heavily watched programs in American "cable news."

(For the record, Compagno is a Fox News Channel employee. She's a co-host of a daily pseudo-discussion program, Outnumbered.)

No, Virginia! The Gutfeld! program isn't "political satire." This program is a corporate assault on this flailing nation's discourse, with people like the famously excitable Compagno playing their role each night.

Questions! Is or was Abrego Garcia ever "gang affiliated?" At this point, we'd say the answer isn't clear. Here's what Judge Wilkinson said, as noted in this recent report by the New York Times:

The Story of the ‘Mistakenly Deported Maryland Man’

[...]

Whether Mr. Abrego is an MS-13 gang member—as, with equal vehemence, the Trump administration insists and his family denies—remains unclear.

“Perhaps, but perhaps not,” wrote Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative jurist on a federal appeals court in Virginia, pondering whether Mr. Abrego Garcia was a gang member.

Highly respected jurists aren't sure; performers on Gutfeld! are. Plainly. Compagno's grasp of the overall facts was virtually nonexistent—but she knew what the verdict must be, in line with corporate policy.

This sort of thing transpires each night as former cheerleaders, VJs and professional "wrestlers" collude with rotating waves of D-list comedians to affirm the channel's messaging agenda. Maurice Sendak knew "where the wild things are." These employees know who the assholes are—but also, of course, the gang members.

As this imitation of discourse emerges each night, lordly orgs like the New York Times agree to avert their gaze. So do the stars on MSNBC. The assault continues on programs aimed at Red America's voters. Blue America's journalists and academics have agreed to stay silent.

Why do so many neighbors and friends still support the president? In part, it's because the Fox News Channel broadcasts these waves of propaganda all through the day and the night. 

Viewers of this channel don't know that they're being schooled by clowns. They don't know that experts like Compagno don't have the first idea what they're talking about. Beyond that, they see Gutfeld cast in the role of the "the harmless imp" and yes, they are entertained.

Helped by the silence of us lambs, these messaging programs from Red America help explain why President Trump's approval rating may exceed 40 percent. Then too, there's what Compagno said next:

For us, what she said next brought "the eternal note of sadness in."  True fact:

Given some of things we Blues have done in the past however many years, it's hard for panelists on programs like Gutfeld! to ever be totally wrong.

Have we Blues contributed to this president's ongoing success? It's hard for us Blues to see this fact, but the answer, quite plainly, is yes.

Tomorrow: Easy to be hard. Hard to be totally wrong.