Someday Their Prince Will Come

47% blame Trump and the GOP for the government shutdown.

Poll respondents said the president and his party were responsible for the shutdown for refusing to compromise while having full control over Congress and also Trump's actions.

I’m not sure whether the 47% blame the GOP because they control Congress and Trump’s actions, or if they blame Trump for control (or lack thereof) for his actions.  But maybe I should blame the editors.

23%, by the way, don’t know who to blame. Leaving a slightly larger, 30%, who blame Democrats.

Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating is down to 43%, leaving 57% who disapprove. I guess 0% don’t know what the hell they think about that. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Back to the poll on the shutdown:

The poll found that eight out of 10 Democrats and 7 out of 10 independents were concerned about the shutdown. By comparison, less than half of Republicans were concerned, according to the poll.

So MAGA is less than half the GOP, and 30%, or at least less than 43%, of the electorate. Yeah, that’s not the way to use statistics, but it is a winner take all system for Presidential elections, and this is why the GOP wants to gerrymander districts ahead of 2026. But I think we’re finding the floor for MAGA and the GOP. It’s also interesting that Democrats are over performing in special elections; and, once again, the GOP has rushed headlong into a government shutdown, only to have it bite ‘em in the ass. If memory serves, this kind of thing started under Gingrich:

The GOP hasn’t benefited from them since. Someday they’ll learn that lesson.

The other side of this, is that shutdowns don’t work because average Americans miss their government services. So, if course, Trump’s “feral cunning” leads him to use the shutdown as an “excuse” to further degrade those services:

In some of the conversations I'm having with people throughout the administration, a lot of them are targeting Democratic priorities," Treene said. "At least that's how people in this White House are describing it, and one thing, again, I need to make clear is just how rare this is. It's not even just rare, it's unprecedented in no other shutdowns that we've looked at. We've dug into the data, has any previous president or administration used a shutdown in this way to try to enact widespread cuts to the federal workforce and to these types of programs, and, look, I mean, from what they're trying to argue for, the reasoning for a lot of this, we keep hearing the president himself call this an unprecedented opportunity that he couldn't believe Democrats gave him."

"They're arguing that if the Democrats had agreed to that short-term funding bill, the CR, as they call it, then this could have been avoided, that they could have negotiated a budget together," Treene added. "But now, since the government is shut down, they essentially can move forward with some of these cuts without congressional approval, and also that essentially the White House is going to take the budget into their own hands."

Actually, a government budget shutdown doesn’t suspend the Constitution; but the White House taking full responsibility for the budget is sheer genius. Or feral cunning. Anyway, I’m sure it will work out as well for them as the shutdown has.