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One month into Donald Trump’s term, it appears that his agenda of empowering computer programmers steeped in white supremacist internet discourse to disassemble the government—including the parts that everyone obviously needs and that were working fine—is being met with some consternation by the general public.

Whether the general public would even become aware of what Trump has been doing was a question that had been keeping rank-and-file Democrats up at night. Fewer and fewer Americans are finding out about current events from traditional mainstream sources like newspapers and TV news; the social media and streaming personalities that are replacing them often take a conspiratorial, partisan, and not particularly factual perspective. Many of them, in the most recent election, supported Trump.

One way an opposition party might work around this is by having its leaders communicate directly with voters through their own social media channels, or by creating viral moments. Unfortunately, Democrats’ top figures at present are Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of whom come from the extremely cautious, horribly overthought, inexplicably alliteration-brained school of “Pokémon Go to the Polls”–type messaging that makes me, for one, want to lie face down in a drainage ditch. These are not men who are going to break through on TikTok.

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Americans Are Asking: Did Trump Take Egg?
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A wave of polls released Wednesday and Thursday, though, indicates that the Elon Musk–led dynamite job in Washington is not going over well with voters, however they may be hearing about it. Among the results:

• A Washington Post/Ipsos poll found that 53 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, against 45 percent who approve. Only 34 percent approved of Musk’s work, against 49 percent who disapproved.

• Elsewhere in the Post poll, a 57 percent majority said Trump has exceeded his authority as president. Respondents disapproved, by a 52–26 margin, of giving Musk the power to shut down government departments. In a Quinnipiac poll, 55 percent of voters said Musk has too much power, as compared to 36 percent who said he has the right amount. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 62 percent of respondents objected to the idea that the president should be able to fire federal employees who don’t support him; only 23 percent agreed.

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• A comprehensive YouGov poll found more respondents opposed than in support of Trump’s push to fire hundreds of thousands of federal workers. Those surveyed, as a group, also disapproved of initiatives to rename the Gulf of Mexico, drop corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest undocumented immigrants in places of worship, impose 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, offer refugee status to white South Africans, and name himself chair of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts (LOL), among others. (That said, YouGov’s poll did find voters approving of Trump’s performance overall, 50–45. He’s still juuuuust above water in the FiveThirtyEight approval-rating aggregator.)

• There’s trouble for Trump even on immigration and the economy, the issues where he traditionally polls the best. In the Post poll, wide majorities disapproved of his initiatives to deport immigrants whose only crime is being in the U.S. without documentation (57–39 against) and to expel legal refugees who are from countries experiencing violent conflicts (56–38 against). The Post found Trump underwater by 8 points on his handling of the economy; in the Quinnipiac poll, he was underwater by 4 points on the economy and 3 points on immigration. (Note that the poll’s margin of error was +/- 3 percent.) CNN found that 62 percent say he hasn’t gone far enough to reduce the price of everyday goods, such as egg.

Trump has also spent the week attacking Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who objected to the administration’s effort to draft a Russia-friendly “peace” settlement that would end the war between the two countries. Zelensky, Trump claims, does not have the support of the Ukrainian people and is, somehow, to blame for Russia’s invasion. The YouGov poll found that 62 percent of Americans support Ukraine more than Russia in that conflict, versus a minuscule 4 percent who said they support Russia more than Ukraine. Forty-seven percent of respondents said they had a favorable impression of Zelensky; only 12 percent said the same about Vladimir Putin.

In short, Trump’s heel turn against Ukraine is probably not one that is going to arrest the slide of his approval rating. Nor will triggering further inflation by imposing more tariffs, as he threatened this week to do on automobiles, prescription drugs, and computer chips. Voters also might not like how the unemployment rate will be affected by hundreds of thousands of laid-off federal tax-refund processors, food safety inspectors, and national park rangers filing for benefits—nor will they likely enjoy the consequences of those cuts.

Too bad for Donald Trump and Elon Musk, huh? Darn.