THURSDAY: Landslide which wasn't yields disapproval!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2025

"Dictator" unmentioned at Fox: All in all, the early headlines weren't especially good. 

The commander had seemed to say that it was actually Ukraine which had actually started the war. That nation's president was a "dictator," he then unmistakably said.

You didn't have to read the columns which resulted—the headlines delivered the mail. There was quite a lot of disapprobation, including from the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal:

Trump Tilts Toward a Ukraine Sellout
He puts more pressure on Kyiv for a deal than he does on the Kremlin.

 Oof! Even from that perch in the Murdoch realm, that's what the dual headline said—and so too at the New York Post!

Trump is asking for FAR too much ‘payback’ from war-torn Ukraine

That's a Murdoch entity too.

Over at the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof quickly weighed in:

With Trump’s Prostration to Putin, Expect a More Dangerous World

Kristof is center left. At the same newspaper, Bret Stephens is center right, but he was offering this:

Vance’s Munich Disgrace

That column predated the "dictator" play, though only by a few hours. Stephens was savaging the recent speeches in Europe by the guy who invented the story about Haitians eating everyone's pets.

Two voices spoke at The Atlantic. Eliot Cohen has long been a man of the center right. His column appeared beneath this:

Incompetence Leavened With Malignity
The Trump administration’s Ukraine policy is liable to end in disaster.

Tom Nichols had generally been center right too, though he's long been anti-Trump. His dual headline said this:

A Terrible Milestone in the American Presidency
Trump switches sides in the war for freedom.

Over at the Washington Post, David Ignatius doubles as a regular player in the most intelligent discussions seen in American cable news. His headline was negative too:

A Trump outrage that stands apart
The president blames Ukraine for its own brutalization.

So it suddenly went, around the dial, as Trump trashed the great dictator. You'll recall that our digest includes the editorial boards of 1) the Wall Street Journal and 2) the New York Post!

On the programs of the Fox News Channel, silence largely prevailed. Is it true that Ukraine had started the war? Is it true that Zelensky's a dictator? 

The word "dictator" has barely been uttered on Fox News Channel programs. That said, Brit Hume, the channel's chief political analyst, managed to smuggle a samizdat out. You can read all about it in this report at Mediaiite:

‘Music to Vladimir Putin’s Ears’: Fox News’ Brit Hume Reacts Ominously to Trump’s Latest Anti-Ukraine Screed

It isn't that everyone has to agree, in every way, with the views which were generally expressed by this array of observers. But over at the Fox News Channel, the usual suspects engaged in discussions of other topics and sometimes fell back on sheer clowning.

The open misogyny continued apace on the gruesome Gutfeld! show. As usual, the women of The View were quickly compared to whales. 

As usual, things went downhill from there. They pry the lid off this braindead garbage can at 10 p.m. every night!

Along the way, the landslide which actually wasn't a landslide was sliding toward disapproval. The Washington Post reports:

Many of Trump’s early actions are unpopular, Post-Ipsos poll finds

President Donald Trump has opened his second term with a flurry of actions designed to radically disrupt and shrink the federal bureaucracy, but reviews from Americans are mixed to negative on many of his specific initiatives, and 57 percent say he has exceeded his authority since taking office, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.

Overall, 43 percent of Americans say they support what the president has done during his first month in office, with 48 percent saying they oppose. Those who strongly oppose outnumber those who strongly support by 37 percent to 27 percent.

The president’s supporters applaud him for deporting undocumented immigrants and cutting government waste. Those unhappy with the direction he is taking the country say they fear Trump is allowing billionaire Elon Musk to dismantle critical government programs.

[...]

Overall, the Post-Ipsos poll finds 45 percent of adults approve of the way Trump is handling his job, while 53 percent disapprove. That net-negative rating is worse than findings in other public polls. A Washington Post average of February polls shows 47 percent approving and 49 percent disapproving. Whether the difference reflects normal variation in public polls or a more negative reaction to recent actions is not clear.

So how about it? Is it 43-48 negative, or 45-53? As always, different questions yield different results in this most complex of all possible worlds. 

That said, neither set of numbers looks amazingly good. Very few presidents (if any?) have ever managed to go in the hole as fast as this one has.

Can you hear them cuckoos hollerin'? At present, the answer is starting to look like a yes. 

What kind of reaction might larger disapproval occasion? It all depends on the extent of the possible madness which has largely gone unnamed and has, lacking a name, largely been under-discussed.