Americans Are Totally Fed Up With Trump, New Poll Finds

Americans at large disapprove of President Trump’s performance on virtually every key issue, according to recent polling from Reuters/Ipsos.

About 48 percent disapprove of his performance regarding the “rule of law,” 49 percent disapprove of his performance on the environment, 51 percent disapprove of his handling of the economy, 52 percent disapprove of his performance on international trade, and a whopping 57 percent disapprove of his performance on the cost of living.

Trump has overhauled the government, upturned the economy, and completely eroded any sense of security or power that the United States offered as a global trading partner. His wantonly placed tariffs will keep the cost of living high (so much for those grocery prices he campaigned on) while doing nothing to reduce inflation. While it’s unusual for performance ratings to be this paltry this soon in a presidential term, the speed at which Trump has undertaken his chaotic policies certainly explains the numbers. And it’s far from over.

“There’s a big risk for Trump that it’s only going to get worse from here,” said the libertarian CATO Institute’s Scott Lincicome.

Even Donald Trump’s former chief strategist believes that taxing the rich is a good idea.

In an effort to advance the president’s tax bill and defang Democratic attacks on the administration, Steve Bannon is urging Trump to propose a tax hike on multimillionaires, The Washington Post reported Tuesday night.

“One proposal would allow the top tax rate to revert to its level before the 2017 tax law, from 37 percent to 39.6 percent. (This would raise taxes for those with more than $626,350 in earnings),” according to the Post.

The pitch also suggests adopting a new tax bracket for people earning more than $1 million, as well as an additional tax bracket for individuals earning more than $3 million or $5 million.

“This guts the AOC-Bernie ‘oligarchy tour,’” Bannon told the Post, referring to anti-Trump rallies hosted by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders that drew tens of thousands of people.

“Politically, it’s game, set, match—it’s a no-brainer. This would destroy the Democrats,” Bannon said.

Republicans have had a difficult time penciling out Trump’s massive tax plan, which would massively benefit corporations and billionaires and add an estimated $6.8 trillion to the deficit.

But Bannon has been trying to convince conservatives to tax the rich since at least Trump’s first term, and other members of the party are less than convinced that the idea could advance through a Republican-controlled legislature.

“I don’t see it getting through the Senate Finance Committee—there’s not a chance,” Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the right-leaning American Action Forum research group, told the Post. Holtz-Eakin also predicted that the House would “deflect and say they want to consider all possibilities, but it won’t have the votes.”

“They’ll see this as a punitive tax on rich people for no reason,” Holtz-Eakin said. “They don’t like the politics. They don’t like the economics. They’re not interested.”

A federal judge slammed the Department of Justice for refusing to provide answers about the government’s efforts to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador.

In an eight-page filing Tuesday evening, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis overruled several of the government’s objections to answering questions or providing documents, writing that their failure “reflects a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations.”

Lawyers for the DOJ failed to respond to a court-ordered request for information Monday, arguing that it had been made on a “false premise” that the government was required to secure Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador. The Supreme Court had ordered the government to “facilitate” his return. Crucially, Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, and the government has failed to provide any compelling evidence of his alleged gang affiliation.

In her filing, Xinis said that the government had “stubbornly” refused to provide “any basis” for the privileges it was attempting to invoke in its evasion of her questions.

For weeks, lawyers for the government had attempted to hide behind “vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege” to “obstruct discovery and evade compliance,” Xinis wrote. “Defendants have known, at least since last week, that this Court requires specific legal and factual showings to support any claim of privilege. Yet they have continued to rely on boilerplate assertions. That ends now.”

Xinis told the lawyers that they would have only 24 hours to assert any final privileges in the requisite detail.

“If Defendants want to preserve their privilege claims, they must support them with the required detail. Otherwise, they will lose the protections they failed to properly invoke,” she warned.

Xinis excoriated the government’s refusal to provide additional names of those involved in Abrego Garcia’s deportation as “willful and intentional noncompliance,” and overruled the lawyers’ claim that information about how he was placed in CECOT, the prison in El Salvador notorious for human rights abuses, was “outside the scope” of expedited discovery.

“This is particularly relevant to Abrego Garcia’s custodial status today, if for nothing else, the Plaintiffs are entitled to discover all relevant and probative evidence that undermines the Defendants’ incomplete and evasive answer that Abrego Garcia is in the ‘sovereign, domestic custody’ of El Salvador,” she wrote.

In a meeting with Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen last week, Abrego Garcia said he had since been moved to a different prison.

Donald Trump is backtracking on some of his wild economic moves.

The president said Tuesday that has “no intention” of firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, after days of insults and threats over whether Powell would cut interest rates. It’s quite a reversal from Trump saying Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough,” the week before. Still, Trump would like those rate cuts.

“I would like to see [Powell] be a little more active in terms of his idea to lower interest rates,” Trump said Tuesday while swearing in the new Securities and Exchange Commission chair. “It is a perfect time to lower interest rates.”

Trump also backed down from threatening China on Tuesday, saying that he wouldn’t seek to punish China any further in the Oval Office and telling reporters that tariff rates against the country would be lowered.

“[The rates] will come down substantially, but it won’t be zero,” Trump said, adding that “we’re going to be very nice, and they’re going to be very nice, and we’ll see what happens.” China appears to be reciprocating, with a spokesperson for the country’s Foreign Ministry telling reporters Wednesday that “the door for talks is wide open.”

It seems that the struggling stock market and panicked U.S. executives have persuaded Trump to modify whatever concepts of a plan he has for the economy, as every economic indicator spells disaster. Trump’s tariff whiplash, where he has alternated between raising and lowering tariffs, has caused market chaos for several weeks.

Instituting an astronomical tariff rate of 145 percent against China, one of the country’s largest trading partners, has not inspired confidence from American businesses, and China is holding firm on getting Trump to back down. Tuesday’s shift from the president indicates that he is fearful of what will happen if his current approach backfires.

Vice President JD Vance admitted outright on Wednesday that the United States is prepared to completely abandon Ukraine. 

“We’ve issued a very explicit proposal to both the Russians and Ukrainians, and it’s time for them to either say yes, or for the U.S. to walk away from this process,” he said from India. “We’ve engaged in an extraordinary amount of diplomacy, of on-the-ground work.

“The current lines, somewhere close to them is where you’re ultimately, I think, going to draw the new lines in the conflict,” Vance added, making it clear that Ukraine would have to give up territory to Russia.

This comes as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff decided not to attend the planned meeting between the U.S., Ukraine, and other European leaders, due to what Rubio’s spokesperson called “logistical issues.” 

The U.S. has been unilaterally trying to strong-arm Ukraine into a ceasefire with Russia, while the Europeans try to support Ukraine’s attempts to fight off the Russian invasion. These talks were supposed to be an attempt to bridge the gap between the U.S. and Europe and to make Putin negotiate on more equitable terms that don’t see him retaining large chunks of Ukrainian territory. But Vance just gave the Kremlin yet another green light.