Tag: americans
Elon Musk

New Polls: America Rejects Musk And His 'DOGE' Exploits

Much of the American public is souring on billionaire Elon Musk and the heavy influence he appears to wield over the federal government.

Fifty-two percent of registered voters have an unfavorable view of Musk, while just 39 percent view him favorably, according to new data from the polling firm Civiqs. That includes a stark gender divide: A little under half of male voters (45 percent) have a favorable view of Musk compared with 57 percent of female voters who view him unfavorably.

More than three-quarters (79 percent) of Republicans held the X owner in high regard, while 95 percent of Democrats aren’t fans. Independents lean toward Democrats’ opinion too, with 52 percent having an unfavorable view of Musk and only 36 percent having a favorable view.

However, there was a time when Musk wasn’t nearly as much in the public eye and Americans had a relatively positive view of him. But turning X into a far-right echo chamber and cozying up to President Donald Trump seems to have sullied his image. In the span of a few months, Musk dunked on a recent artificial intelligence venture Trump announced and helped defeat a government spending bill in Congress. You’d think this would be enough to keep him busy, but Musk also managed to piss off some of Trump’s biggest allies, including former adviser Steve Bannon, who seems to really despise him.

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” Bannon said of Musk in January. “I made it my personal thing to take this guy down.”

A January survey from The Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows how much Musk’s recent moves have harmed his public perception. According to the poll, more than half of Americans (52 percent) had an unfavorable opinion of Musk, compared with 36 percent who viewed him favorably, putting him 16 points underwater. Compare that to a December survey from the same pollster that showed Musk’s favorability only 10 points underwater.

Other recent polls back this up:

  • A Wall Street Journal poll had Musk’s favorability 11 points underwater (40 percent favorable, 51 percent unfavorable).
  • A Marist College poll for NPR and PBS News found Musk 9 points underwater (37 percent favorable, 46 percent unfavorable) among registered voters.
  • Then there’s a Quinnipiac University poll from December that had Musk 5 points underwater (39 percent favorable, 44 percent unfavorable). Compare that with a Quinnipiac survey conducted two years prior, in December 2022, which showed Musk being slightly above water (36 percent favorable, 33 percent unfavorable).

Perhaps Americans dislike Musk because he’s linked to Trump, who is hellbent on pushing through unpopular things like tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico.

Then again, they also might not like Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory commission with no direct power over the federal government. It makes sense that Americans are on edge about Musk’s well-publicized promises to slash federal spending. After all, a Data for Progress poll for the Progressive Change Institute shows most likely voters are very concerned about DOGE’s threat to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, veteran’s health care programs, and food assistance for low-income families.

On top of that, Musk seems to wield a lot of governmental power for someone who was never elected to public office. And several polls show that people don’t like how much influence he seems to have over Trump and Republicans.

The December survey from Quinnipiac also showed that 53 percent of voters disapprove of Musk’s major role in the Trump administration. But there’s a partisan split. While 90 percent of Democrats are opposed to his role in the administration, 81 percent of Republicans approve of it. (Independents are largely against Musk’s role as well, with 57 percent disapproving.)

Other polls have found similar results. For instance, The Wall Street Journal’s poll found that half of voters think it’s a bad idea for Musk to advise Trump on spending bills and other matters, while just 39 percent say it’s a good idea for him to do so.

What’s more, Data for Progress found that 51 percent of likely voters believe Musk will use DOGE to his own benefit instead of making the government more efficient. While Democrats (74 percent) were more likely than independent or third-party voters (49 percent) to think this, Republicans expressed concerns too. An eyebrow-raising 29 percent of Republicans agree that Musk will use DOGE to “redirect more government resources towards himself and weaponize the federal government to undermine his business rivals.”

These combined data points suggest that the political middle is over Musk. And even some who don’t yet despise him are wary of what he’ll do as Trump’s “first buddy.”

And for Trump, Musk might become a big liability if the base turns on him even more than they already have.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

White House

Why America Needs Birthright Citizenship

It's part of who we are.

The White House executive order theoretically ending birthright citizenship grandly proclaims its purpose as "Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship." As we've come to expect from this administration, the proposed change to American law would do the exact opposite. Also in keeping with the Trumpian model, the president's comments accompanying the signing were false. "Birthright, that's a big one," Trump frowned. "It's ridiculous. We are the only country in the world that does this with the birthright, as you know, and it's just absolutely ridiculous."

Trump frequently adds "as you know" or "as you know very well" to his reality-bending comments to rope the hearers (usually members of the press) into a kind of involuntary consent. They have no opportunity to object or protest, and so he seems to rope them into his various fantasies, such as the lie that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election or that Ukraine hosted Hillary Clinton's CrowdStrike email server.

But, no, we don't know very well that the United States is the only country in the world that grants unconditional birthright citizenship. Not even close. According to a 2018 report by the Library of Congress, practically the entire Western Hemisphere does the same, including Canada and Mexico. Pakistan too gives citizenship to every child born within its borders, and Germany and the UK have something close — extending it to babies with one citizen or permanent resident parent.

Nor is it the case, as Trump contended in his first term, that "birth tourism" is an urgent national problem. The anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies published a claim that 33,000 babies were born per year to women traveling to the United States just to give birth. The Niskanen Center examined their statistics and found that, while it's true that some women do scheme to have their babies here, the CIS numbers were wildly exaggerated. The true number, they reckon, was closer to 2,000.

Trump is trying to behave like an emperor. He sits at the Resolute Desk and scrawls his Sharpie across documents as if that's all there is to it. He has the effrontery to do so with the preamble "By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered ... "

The president has vast powers, but he does not have unlimited power. He cannot, with the stroke of a pen, repeal a Constitutional amendment. And the Constitution of the United States is entirely clear about birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment prescribes that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." This was a Constitutional corrective to the infamous Dred Scott decision that had denied all rights to African Americans. The phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was understood at the time to exclude the children of diplomats and some Native American tribes — not immigrants. This isn't some throwaway line that no one has ever challenged. In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that a man who had been born to Chinese immigrant parents on U.S. soil could not be denied his citizenship even though in the years after his birth, Congress had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.

As Judge John C. Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, noted last week in a ruling temporarily blocking Trump's order, "This is a blatantly unconstitutional order." He even directed some ire at Trump administration lawyers, saying, "Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind."

The assault on birthright citizenship is more than an overzealous assault on immigration; it is part of Trump's ongoing attempt to limit membership in the American family. He rose to political prominence by calling the first Black president's citizenship into question, bullied Black lawmakers with the taunt that they should go back to where they came from and lamented that we are not attracting more immigrants from places like Norway. Not subtle.

Those who approve of Trump's approach (even if they acknowledge that he should do this via a proposed constitutional amendment instead of an absurd ukase) should reflect on what it would mean to repeal birthright citizenship. The rule that your citizenship cannot be questioned if you are born on American soil is integral to American identity.

This country is not comprised of people sharing the same ethnicity and heritage. It is not the ancestral homeland of anyone except the Native Americans. It is composed of immigrants (most voluntary, some enslaved) who made this their home. No American should feel that his Americanness is dependent upon long ancestry in the land. Trump's own mother was born abroad. Most of his children are also the children of immigrants. No, if you're born here or become a naturalized citizen, you are as American as any Mayflower descendant.

If we were to dispense with birthright citizenship, we would erode the sense of equality that Americans enjoy and replace it with tiers — legitimate citizens who can trace their ancestry back a generation or two, and interlopers.

One of the greatest strengths of this country has been our ability to assimilate immigrants and transform them from whatever they were into Americans. Birthright citizenship is a vital aspect of this process. The parents who welcome an American citizen child are tied to their child's nationality and all the more willing to contribute and participate.

As a Jewish American, I've looked countless times at my passport in gratitude that I was born in New York City and no one could contest my legitimacy. If birthright citizenship is overturned, what will the criteria for unassailable Americanness be?

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Donald Trump

Shaking A Shrunken  Stick, Trump Leads America Boldly Into Decline

Not a month old, the second Trump presidency is barreling toward the decline that big-mouth leaders have been sending their countries for centuries. Theodore Roosevelt warned of such dangers.

Speaking at the 1901 Minnesota State Fair, he famously shared the African proverb, "Speak softly and carry a big stick."

Roosevelt elaborated: "If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble." For a nation, he added, "It is both foolish and undignified to indulge in undue self-glorification, and, above all, in loose-tongued denunciation of other peoples."

Trump's threat of a 25 percent tariff against Colombia if it didn't start accepting planeloads of deported Colombians did work. But rather than take quiet satisfaction, he had to make a high school-level jab against Colombia's leader, calling him "very unpopular amongst his people." (An earlier White House statement on the planned sanctions ignorantly misspelled Colombia as "Columbia.'" That's the university, not the country. Also the Hollywood filmmaker.)

China is another matter. Trump has backed off on the big-stick approach toward China. He's now threatening tariffs of 10 percent, marked down from his earlier 60 percent. But can China be intimidated by a smaller stick from a blowhard? A stick of any size constitutes a challenge to China's self-esteem, something China has in quantity, and its own quest for global dominance.

About which, China has developed an AI model called DeepSeek that's almost as good as its American competitors' while using inferior AI chips. It costs a lot less and consumes less energy. That triggered a rout on Wall Street, hitting investors, not to mention Trump's beloved technology oligarchs, in the gut.

Americans now have a recovering (we hope) alcoholic in charge of the nation's defense. Even if Pete Hegseth were a beacon of sobriety, he utterly lacked the qualifications for that job. He was, however, a photogenic talking head on Fox.

On his first day at Defense, Hegseth announced big plans to ban transgender people from the military. Why Americans should feel safer knowing that people who identify with a gender other than the one they were born with can't serve in the military is unclear.

Israel, Australia, Canada, and Germany let transgender soldiers operate openly without concerns for military readiness. In this country, female-born Shane Ortega served in the Marines before transitioning to male identity. He then transferred to the Army and flew countless helicopter missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Elsewhere in his second presidential term, Trump has failed his promised follow-through on lowering the price of groceries. On the contrary, egg prices are setting new records. They are up nearly 37 percent from this time last year, and are expected to go higher still. Kind of makes you miss the more affordable grocery carts of the Biden era.

Lumber prices have risen 35 percent from five years ago. Trump's threat to slap a 25% tariff on Canada, a major supplier, isn't going to make wood products more affordable. One feels for the disaster-struck people of North Carolina and California who need lumber to rebuild.

But since the construction industry depends so heavily on workers whom Trump vows to rapidly deport, there may not be enough people left to do the rebuilding. At the very least, the cost of employing them would go way up.

As for shaking his shrunken stick at China, Trump has become one of the "obnoxious" individuals Theodore Roosevelt warned against. One "who is always loudly boasting" and "absolutely contemptible" for not being prepared to back up his words.

In other business, Trump's attacks on electric vehicles are helping Chinese competitors eat our domestic carmakers' lunch on EV production and future sales. That depressing topic is for another day.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

President Elect Donald Trump

As Trump Takes Office, His (And Musk's) Approval Ratings Still Underwater

As Donald Trump prepares to take the oath of office for a second time, he claims to have a “massive” mandate to enact his destructive agenda. But new polling shows that’s far from the truth.

A NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll released Wednesday shows that just 44 percent of Americans view Trump favorably, while 49 percent view him unfavorably. That’s nearly identical to the 45 percent approval rating Trump has in Civiqs’ tracking poll.

The fact that Trump is viewed unfavorably before he even takes office is a warning sign for his tenure. The start of a presidential term is usually when a president is at their high-water mark of approval.

When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, 51 percent of registered voters approved of the job he was doing on the transition, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll at the time.

In the first two months after Barack Obama was sworn in as president, around 60 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing, according to 538’s historical polling average. And when he was sworn in again four years later, his approval rating was around 53 percent.

The NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll has other warning signs for Trump.

Just 31percent of Americans say the tariff policy Trump plans to enact would help the economy. That should be a flashing red warning light for Trump, showing that Americans will likely blame him if those tariffs cause prices to skyrocket, as economists expect.

What’s more, 62 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s plan to pardon people who either pleaded guilty or were convicted of crimes for their role in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

It’s not just Trump who is unpopular among voters. Trump's Cabinet nominees are also underwater.

Pete Hegseth, Trump's pick to lead the Department of Defense, has just a 19 percent approval rating in the NPR/PBS News/Marist College survey. And the survey was conducted before Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, when Democratic senators laid bare the nominee’s abhorrent behavior of alleged sexual assault, womanizing, on-the-job drinking, and misogynistic remarks.

Twenty-six percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Hegseth, with the remaining 55 percent not knowing who he is or having no opinion of him.

However, Trump’s co-president, Elon Musk, is broadly unpopular. Only 37 percent of Americans have a favorable view of him, while 46 percent view him unfavorably, according to the poll. That’s also a warning sign for Trump, who is allowing Musk to hog the spotlight and even letting the awkward billionaire occupy an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is next door to the White House.

Ultimately, while it’s awful that Trump will be sworn in for a second time, polling suggests that he will have no honeymoon phase and that backlash to his agenda could be a serious problem for Republicans in the 2026 midterms.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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