Already friendly fire:
Trump approval rating catches the flu, crashes overnight https://t.co/z7nzaN6zxc
— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) February 28, 2020
Rasmussen is the T-Rump’s most-beloved pollster — Raw Story:
Rasmussen Reports, the GOP-friendly pollster frequently cited by President Donald Trump, is showing that the president’s approval rating fell by five points just one day after his widely panned press conference outlining his response to the coronavirus crisis.
According to its latest poll, approval of Trump’s job performance dropped from 52 percent to 47 percent in just one day, and the pollster tells the Washington Examiner that continuing bad news about coronavirus is to blame.
“The drop in Trump’s approval rating follows more news about the spreading coronavirus and the steep drop in the stock market,” the pollster tells the Examiner.
…
Rasmussen typically gives Trump higher marks than other pollsters.
According to RealClearPolitics, other recent polls include a Reuters poll that puts Trump’s approval at 43 percent, while an Economist/YouGov poll has his approval rating at 44 percent.
And as this coronavirus predicament continues, the public response will be shitty for the T-Rump, mainly because the T-Rump’s response to the medical-health issues will be shitty. He’s all in for lying and withholding information. And this situation is not political, it’s realistic medicine and hospitals, and dying, although Republicans are trying their damndest to make it so, as T-Rump attempts to bullshit-bluster his way through another episode of horrid idiotic incompetence.
However, the die has already been cast — via The Week from Wednesday:
But Trump’s denial of the problem also goes way beyond rhetoric.
Over the last two years, Trump has hacked away at the funding and agencies responsible for defending Americans from viral threats.
As Laurie Garrett writes in Foreign Policy, back in 2018, Trump “fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure.”
That same year the CDC cut its efforts to fight global diseases by 80 percent due to lack of funding.
Trump’s administration slashed funding for disease combat across the board, and eliminated a $30 million Complex Crisis Fund.
His recent proposed budget would gut $3 billion in funding for health security.
He would slash funding for State Department and USAID global health programs by a third, cut the CDC budget by 7 percent, cut the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by 58 percent, and reduce U.S. contributions to the World Health Organization by half.
He also has repeatedly proposed enormous cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, and allowed states to throw thousands off the latter program.
Republicans have systematically undermined and weakened ObamaCare, exacerbating a structural weakness to epidemics in American society — our garbage health care system.
Tens of millions of Americans have no insurance and tens of millions of others cannot afford to use the coverage they do have — meaning many will hesitate to go to the doctor to get tested for fear of being gouged by rapacious medical providers.
Indeed, a Florida man who caught the flu in China did the responsible thing and went to the hospital to be tested for COVID-19; when it came back negative, he was slapped with a $1,400 bill despite being insured.
Hopefully, people will start to pay attention. Terrible it took a nasty virus to make it so…
(Illustration: ‘President Trump,’ by Jonathan Bass, found here)