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Saturday, August 19, 2017

How Badly Has President Trump Been Hurt by Charlottesville?

After a week of non-stop Trump-bashing by the mainstream media, Democrats and even some Republicans, we need to consider what effect this has had on his standing with the public.  Josh Kraushaar addresses this issue in a report in National Journal.  The key finding is that in polling done by Gallup and Quinnipiac (which consistently produce results worse for Trump than other pollsters), President Trump's job approval numbers have risen by 5 points following Charlottesville from where they were before all this happened.  He still has low numbers in both polls, but an increase of 5 points is a significant move.  On top of those results, other polls show that the public strongly agrees with the position that statues of civil war heroes of the South should not be removed.

Think about that.  President Trump said that the Antifa thugs in Charlottesville who charged the Nazi and KKK thugs were also to blame for what happened.  Trump didn't give Antifa a pass for breaking the law and assaulting the Nazis even if the Nazis and KKK were a vile group of scum.  The media and the political elites thought this position was immoral.  Political tumbleweeds like Mitt Romney condemned the President for example.  Still, Trump's position that bad people doing bad things are evil even if they are doing the bad things to other bad people, seems to have resonated with the American people. 

We will have to see how this all plays out.  Right now we have many "elites" virtue signaling by expressing disdain for Trump.  I wonder how many of those elites will find out later that common sense condemnation of all violence is the majority position of the American people.

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