INSIDE THAT WORLD-BESTRIDING MEGALOMANIAC BULLY LIVES A MID-LEVEL CEO WORRIED ABOUT THE MARKETS

Donald Trump has been a narcissist all his life, but prior to his career in politics, life occasionally slapped him down: his media coverage was sometimes disrespectful, he was never wholeheartedly welcomed into elite society in New York, and he struggled to keep his businesses afloat and his personal wealth intact.

That 1980s/1990s guy still lives inside the global bully we see today. I think twentieth-century Trump's insecurities explain this:

President Trump reiterated his determination to take control of Greenland from Denmark during a 72-minute tirade at the World Economic Forum — but seemingly ruled out using force to do so....

Trump began the Greenland portion of his speech by calling for "immediate negotiations" to acquire the Arctic territory, mocking Denmark for losing it "in six hours" during World War II.

But he also signaled it was time for de-escalation with NATO, dismissing fears that the U.S. military would attack its own allies.

... Trump said that if the U.S. decided to take Greenland by force it would be "unstoppable," but "I don't want to use force. I won't use force. All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland."

Trump apparently couldn't remember which cold island he wants to seize against the residents' will (and the global community's will), but he was clearly shaken up by yesterday's selloff.

Trump is now confusing Greenland and Iceland: "They're not there for us on Iceland, that I can tell you. Our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland has already cost us a lot of money."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 21, 2026 at 9:20 AM

The selloff was nothing -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1.8% yesterday, far less than the worst plunges in history, like the 22.61% drop on October 19, 1987, just about the time that Trump's own businesses began sinking into a sea of red ink. As The New York Times reported a few years ago, referring to a period when Trump suffered nearly a billion dollars in business losses:

... Mr. Trump’s 1990 collapse might have struck several years earlier if not for his brief side career posing as a corporate raider. From 1986 through 1988, while his core businesses languished under increasingly unsupportable debt, Mr. Trump made millions of dollars in the stock market by suggesting that he was about to take over companies. But the figures show that he lost most, if not all, of those gains after investors stopped taking his takeover talk seriously.

Trump intimidates powerful people in America and the rest of the world, but the markets intimidate him. He knows that even if it's seen as a last resort, Europe could use its Anti-Coercion Instrument -- the so-called "bazooka"-- to restrict trade and prevent U.S. companies, especially tech companies, from bidding on European public contracts.

The markets seem to be the only force Trump fears -- see also his "TACO" (Trump always chickens out) approach to truly punitive tariffs. It's regrettable that the markets won't do more than give Trump an occasional wrist-slap -- as I said yesterday, they don't really fear that Trump's mad-king reign will lead to catastrophe for them -- but it's fortunate that he remains responsive even to mild financial punishment. (I'm sure Trump has heard an earful recently from old billionaires in corner offices. He talks a lot with aging moguls, many of whom he's known for half a century.) Other institutions won't save us, but the markets might be a small check on Trump's ambitions.

And yes, I fully realize that Trump might change his mind about using force to take Greenland weeks, days, or hours from now. But if he doesn't, then capitalism saved us from a full-scale Greenland War and the end of NATO.

IT STILL DOESN'T SEEM LIKE A CRISIS TO ANYONE RICH ENOUGH TO MATTER

I regularly see social media posts floating this scenario:

This won't happen. Normal people are fed up with Trump, or at least disapproving of the way he's doing his job, but Republican voters are still worshipful. Any Cabinet member who supported Trump's removal from office would be declared an unperson in the Republican Party and would be faced with daily death threats and threats to spouses and family, which might or might not be carried out. So forget it, folks. They're not going to eighty-six the mad king.

You might imagine that rich and powerful people are worried about the chaos Trump is unleashing -- NATO under threat, a "sell America" mood on global markets, and so on. But you always have to remember that the rich can put their money on whichever side of a rising or falling market makes them the most cash. Right now they don't see the potential for a 2008-style crash, and even if it happened, they'd expect to be made whole if they suffered significant losses, and both political parties would agree that that was for the best.

Moral hazards don't get much more hazardous than that. The people in power simply don't believe their world is going to hell in a handbasket, even if ours is. Meanwhile, they're getting their tax cuts. They're getting their regulatory cuts. They might need to bribe Trump to continue doing business more or less as usual, but as long as he's clear about his price, they're willing to pay it. They don't like the tariffs, but the bifurcated, "K-shaped" economy means that there are rich and upper-middle-class people for whom the price increases aren't a problem, so the economy rumbles on.

We're in this mess because it's practically impossible for rich people to stop being rich. They never have reason to fear, so they have no fear of Trump's societal disruptions. The people who run our economy would probably be whispering to their friends at The New York Times and The Atlantic that it was time to start writing about impeachment or 25th Amendment removal if they felt they were at risk now, but they don't. They don't see Trump's madness as anything more than a minor problem. There certainly won't be a "business plot" to overthrow him in a military coup, as there was when Franklin Roosevelt was president. The rich are too well insulated.

It's all on us. Insiders and fat cats won't help us.

IMAGINE HOW MANY SEATS DEMOCRATS COULD WIN IN NOVEMBER IF THEY ACTUALLY RAN AGAINST THEIR OPPONENTS

There's some good news and some bad news for Democrats in recent polling. This is very good news:

The Democratic Party has a deeply motivated base and a clear advantage on the generic congressional ballot ahead of this fall’s midterms despite dismal impressions of its current leaders in Congress, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

Democratic registered voters are far more motivated right now than Republicans. While the party has a 5-point edge on the generic ballot, among those who say they’re deeply motivated to vote, that advantage expands to a massive 16 points.

Democratic voters are dissatisfied with the party's congressional leadership, but they're ready to vote Democratic, in a big way. That's good.

This is not so good:

On issue after issue, according to the latest Wall Street Journal poll, voters think Republicans -- specifically, Republicans in Congress -- would do a better job than Democrats in Congress. This is in spite of the fact that voters are quite unhappy with the way the Republican president of the United States is handling these same issues:

... more voters disapprove than approve of his handling of inflation—by 17 percentage points, a worse showing than the 11-point gap in July. By 10 percentage points, more voters disapprove than approve of his handling of the economy.

... 58% of voters in the survey said that Trump’s policies were most responsible for the current economy, while 31% said former President Joe Biden’s policies were most responsible.

And many voters in the survey think Trump has distracted himself from what is most important.

Majorities say they disapprove when asked whether Trump has the right priorities, is looking out for middle-class families or cares about “people like you.” Asked about the president’s attention to Venezuela, Iran and other countries, a 53% majority says he is focusing on unnecessary foreign matters at the expense of the economy, while 42% say he’s working on urgent national security threats.

Voters strongly disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy, inflation, foreign policy, and immigration, yet they think his rubber-stamp party-mates in Congress would do a better job than Democrats on all these issues. Why?

This is what happens when Democrats incessantly sing the praises of bipartisanship and refuse to say that the opposition party is bad because they think it will somehow offend Chuck Schumer's mythical Baileys if they do.

You're probably tired of hearing me say this, but it is normal politics to say that the other party is bad and your own party is better. Democrats reverse this. The party's leaders and consultants can't stop engaging in public criticism of fellow Democrats, who are accused of being "weak and woke" and alienating voters with "faculty-lounge language," and they regularly vow to work across the aisle if elected, even though the people they'd work across the aisle with are the principal enablers of a very unpopular president.

And Democrats' message is weak tea. Here's a Chuck Schumer quote from The Bulwark. Schumer is talking about the possibility that Democrats could win the Senate:

SCHUMER: Let me say this: We have a strong, clear path to winning the majority. We are on our front foot and we are in much, much better shape than people ever thought we would be. A year ago, people thought we had no chance of taking back the Senate. And then I laid out to people that we had to do three things to take back the Senate: recruit candidates in our battleground states, create a political environment where across the country Trump was much weaker, and show that when we get back in charge, we’re going to actually do things. That we’re not just criticizing them.

You will see in the next months, we’re going to be focusing on five buckets. One is housing, one is the high price of food [and] food monopolies playing a major role there. One is electricity. One is the high cost of childcare. And then, of course, health care.

None of these messages -- these "buckets" -- are The Republican Party is dragging this country to hell, and we need to stop them.

I think the messaging will improve in individual races, as it did in New Jersey and Virginia last year. But this is a long-term problem for the Democratic Party. The Republican Party is led by a very unpopular president, a man who inspires blind loyalty in all but a handful of Republicans, but Democrats refuse to say, The GOP is bad for America.

Say it with me now, Chuck: The GOP is the party of inflation and tariffs. The GOP is the party of invading Greenland. The GOP is the party of shooting mothers in the face. There -- that wasn't so hard, was it?

ARE WE IN THE LAWLESS STATE OR THE NON-LAWLESS STATE?

David French says we're living in a "dual state."

... we’ve slowly but surely created the mechanisms of what the Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel called “the dual state.”

Last March, Aziz Huq, a University of Chicago law professor, wrote a prescient (and deeply disturbing) piece for The Atlantic that revived Fraenkel’s analysis for this new American age....

The two components of the dual state are the normative state — the seemingly normal world that you and I inhabit, where, as Huq writes, the “ordinary legal system of rules, procedures and precedents” applies — and the prerogative state, which is marked (in Fraenkel’s words) by “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.”

“The key here,” Huq writes, “is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state.”

It’s the continued existence of the normative state that lulls a population to sleep. It makes you discount the warnings of others. “Surely,” you say to yourself, “things aren’t that bad. My life is pretty much what it was.”

French says that Minneapolis still functions mostly as a normative state -- but if you cross paths with ICE, as Renee Good did, you can be a victim of the prerogative state.

I think it's appropriate to apply this framework to American life now -- and it's why I wrote a post yesterday warning that our electoral system could be at risk, despite the reassurances of many commentators, including French himself. In the New York Times roundtable I quoted yesterday, Jamelle Bouie, David French, and Michelle Cottle argued that the Trump administration's court losses on various issues ought to reassure us that elections will go forward as planned in November.

Bouie: ... I feel like it’s necessary to say that there’s a lot of fear-mongering and scaremongering about what the president can do with regards to the midterms and —

Cottle: Well, he just got shot down by the courts, right?

Bouie: Right.

Cottle: He was arguing that he needed to deprive states of federal funding if they didn’t follow his rules for how they run their elections. And the courts are like: No, bro, step back.

Bouie: He’s demanding voter rolls. And the courts are saying, no, none of this is your business. So for Trump to try to cancel an election in Virginia, for example, like Abigail Spanberger would have to be like, OK, sure.

Cottle: Yeah, that’s going to happen.

Bouie: How is Donald Trump going to stop Gavin Newsom? How is he going to stop Kathy Hochul? You have to think in practical terms. And I understand the temptation to latch on to worst-case scenarios and fantasies. It makes a lot of sense in the moment. But you have to temper that stuff with thinking, how does the practical operation of government actually work?

French: ... there’s another factor that I don’t think people have appreciated quite enough, and that is the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Illinois here in the last few weeks, where it upheld an order blocking the National Guard deployment under this particular statute that Trump was trying to use. That if he was permitted to use it, at his discretion, at his will, we don’t have very many ICE officers, but we’ve got hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the Guard.

... I think that the Trump v. Illinois case was very, very important because it’s really cut off from him this ability to deploy the Guard at his whim.

What they all seem to be saying is that elections absolutely won't take place in the prerogative state, where Trump can do whatever the hell he wants. They'll take place in the normative state, where laws still apply.

But then French says:

Now there’s still the Insurrection Act hovering out there. That’s a whole different can of worms. But I do think that there’s great hope.

Yup, and today we're reading this:

The Pentagon has ordered about 1,500 active-duty soldiers to prepare for a possible deployment to Minnesota, defense officials told The Washington Post late Saturday, after President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to unrest there....

The Army placed the units on prepare-to-deploy orders in case violence in Minnesota escalates, officials said, characterizing the move as “prudent planning.” It is not clear whether any of them will be sent to the state, the officials said....

This is the problem: aspects of American life move out of the prerogative state and then move right back into it. Trump can't deploy National Guard troops, but he can deploy ICE, and he could deploy active-duty soldiers. He accepts some court rulings and looks for ways around others. We don't know which state we're in from one moment to the next.

It's possible that Trump will allow elections to proceed more or less as they usually do in November except in Minnesota, because he's so obsessed with the state. Remember, Democrats are trying to win back the Senate, and the Senate seat of retiring senator Tina Smith will be up for grabs. Also, Tim Walz has bowed out of the governor's race, and it appears that the state's other senator, Amy Klobuchar, wants to run for governor.

If he chose to, Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota and stage troops at polling places -- but only in heavily Democratic Minneapolis and St. Paul. Could he prevent residents of the Twin Cities from voting and possibly throw the gubernatorial election to a Republican candidate (maybe even, God help us, Mike Lindell)? Could he throw the Senate race to a Republican? Even if Democrats turn out to vote in the Twin Cities, could he have ballots impounded and declare that victorious Democrats won by fraud?

We just don't know when we're going to be in the prerogative state and when we aren't. As a New Yorker, I assumed we'd be where Minneapolis is now as soon as Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor. It hasn't happened -- yet.

America is a dual state, but it's not a static dual state. It's never clear when you're going to find yourself in the lawless part of Trump's America.

YOU AREN'T AN IDIOT IF YOU WORRY ABOUT THE MIDTERMS

Jamelle Bouie wants us all to know that President Trump can't mess with the midterms. Here's what he says in a New York Times roundtable with David French and Michelle Cottle:

... there’s been a lot of chatter on the internet about the president canceling elections. And since we’re talking about the midterms, I feel obligated to say that that’s not a thing. I know the response is going to be: look, he does everything else he wants. But the more accurate response is that there are a lot of ways in which he’s been stopped or blocked. And in a very practical sense, states run elections. States run federal elections — not the president.

The president has no role in federal elections. The president has no role in certifying federal elections. The president has no role in seating members of Congress. When it comes to the conduct and results of federal elections — at least for legislative elections — the president is just a guy. He’s just a guy watching on CNN like the rest of us.

And yes, he has ICE. He has his own little private army. ICE on paper has 22,000 people. Looking at Minnesota right now, in Minneapolis, they’ve committed more than 10 percent of their on-paper agents to try to pacify the 46th largest city in the country, 45th, 46th. And they can’t do it. Obstinate, middle-aged Midwesterners have essentially stopped ICE from operating in Minneapolis in a meaningful way.

I feel like it’s necessary to say that there’s a lot of fear-mongering and scaremongering about what the president can do with regards to the midterms....

But you don't have to believe that Trump "does everything else he wants" to worry about the midterms. You can acknowledge the ways that the system has rebuffed him and still recognize that if he wants to prevent a Democratic takeover of the House and possibly the Senate, he might have ways to thwart the the will of the voters.

But don't even bother arguing this at Bluesky -- or, presumably, any other forum where liberals and progressives congregate. You'll be called an idiot and accused of "obeying in advance," even though you're the one warning that that Trojan horse might have soldiers in it. You'll be told that you're trying to make everyone who opposes Trump feel hopeless, even if what you're really doing is urging everyone to be ready for a bigger fight.

I find much of what Bouie says persuasive. I don't think Trump can shut down elections nationwide at the point of a gun because he doesn't have enough troops to do that. He might do it in Minnesota, because he's clearly decided to single that state out for a special level of abuse. But I don't think he can do it everywhere.

But it's pointless to argue that the law and the Constitution give Trump no official role to play in the midterms. If he declares that the entire process is rotten, we don't know how Republican states will respond. They held the line on behalf of democracy in 2020, and they might do it again, expressing pride in their ability to conduct fair elections. But they might scapegoat Democratic House districts as corrupt if Trump makes clear that he insists on nothing less than that. We don't know.

There are currently 42 Democrats in the House who were elected from states that voted for Trump three times. Not all of those states have unified Republican control, but most do, among them Texas, Florida, and Ohio (25 of the 42 are from these three states, although the numbers are likely to change, especially in Texas because of redistricting).

If Trump demands that Democrats from these states not be certified as winners, what will the states do? Maybe they'll rebuff him. Maybe Democratic court cases will be as successful as they were in 2020.

Or maybe not.

Bouie argues that the system itself acts as a failsafe mechanism.

when the current term of the 119th congress ends on january 2 (or 3, i forget) 227, mike johnson ceases to be speaker of the house bsky.app/profile/gran...

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) January 15, 2026 at 11:36 AM

here's what happens after house elections, which are conducted by each state and locality: the state certifies the winner the winners go to washington they convene a new house they choose a speaker notice who isn't involved here? the president or the current speaker or the senate.

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) January 15, 2026 at 11:47 AM

But that's how the system is supposed to work: the members-elect are supposed to choose a speaker on January 3 (it took them a couple of extra days to get that done in 2025) and the speaker is supposed to swear in winners as certified by the states. But what if we're really through the looking glass and the speaker votes of Democratic winners aren't counted? Why couldn't that happen if Trump insists that it needs to happen? Why should we feel 100% certain that Trumpists can't subvert regular order in this case?

I'm not sure even this deeply corrupt Supreme Court would rubber-stamp all this. The Supremes want to continue flying under the radar, rigging the game, but only in ways that are too abstruse for normies to understand.

And, frankly, I'm not sure Trump will fight this fight. I think he might be caught flatfooted by the election results. He had opportunities in 2025 to declare elections fraudulent and he didn't do it -- I'm not sure why. In 2025, it was probably because his party's control of Congress was never threatened. But he might not even try to rig the process -- sending troops to polling places, for instance -- because he genuinely doesn't think he's unpopular.

So, yes, the midterms might proceed in a fair and democratic way. Trump might be lying to himself about his own popularity or might realize that the people who control our decentralized election system won't rig it for him.

Or 2026 might not be 2020, and the center might not hold. Preserving democracy might require more of a fight this time.

REPUBLICANS HATE SO MANY PEOPLE THEY SOMETIMES LOSE FOCUS

The War on Minnesota wasn't supposed to be about misogyny, but what Michelle Goldberg describes sounds a lot like mission creep:

If you read conservative media, you might have heard about a new danger stalking our besieged country.

This week, Fox News warned about “organized gangs of wine moms” using “antifa tactics” against ICE. According to a column in the right-wing PJ Media, the “greatest threat to our nation” is a “group of ‘unindicted domestic terrorists’ who are just AWFL: Affluent White Liberal Women.” (The acronym is wrong, but never mind.) The Canadian influencer Lauren Chen — who had to leave the United States in 2024 after the Department of Justice accused her of working for a Russian propaganda operation, but was allowed back in by the Trump administration — wrote that the ideology of women like Renee Good is “almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.”

... ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis started with the demonization of Somali immigrants. It took only weeks for conservative demagogues to direct their venom toward the middle-class women of the Resistance. We’re now seeing an outpouring of misogynist rage driven by both political expedience and psychosexual grievance.

Remember, the point of all this was supposed to be rounding up and expelling immigrants. Then the right-wing propaganda machine decided to link the immigrant roundup to fraud in Minnesota -- white-collar crimes that weren't committed by the random blue-collar workers the administration has been seizing off the streets in Minneapolis and other cities. Fraud is best fought by people in offices poring over spreadsheets. It was being fought that way, long before Donald Trump returned to the White House -- the FBI began its investigations in May 2021, a few months after Joe Biden became president.

But Republicans in Washington, at Fox News, and elsewhere in the GOP propaganda community decided that demonizing Somalis in Minnesota -- many of whom are citizens -- was the best way to generate hate content for the GOP base. And then, after an ICE agent murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis, the right switched gears again and decided that white female activists are the real enemy.

No wonder the public, which began 2025 broadly supporting Trump's immigration crackdown, has turned against the administration on this issue.

Republicans hate so many people that they can't keep their focus on enemies they share with normal people. It's completely understandable that normal voters want a crackdown on murderers, rapists, and drug dealers who are here illegally. It's completely understandable that they want a crackdown on fraudsters.

But Republicans don't just hate immigrants who engage in criminal conduct. They hate the ones who bust their humps at difficult jobs for low pay. They hate immigrants here on student visas who don't have the conservatively correct views on Israel and Gaza. And they're so blinded by hate that they indiscriminately shipped immigrants to a foreign torture prison on the basis of innocuous tattoos they misidentified as gang signs.

And now, the same people who brought you the end of Roe v. Wade, then boosted the careers of influencers who argue that career women are history's greatest monsters and maybe only men should be allowed to vote, have decided that normie women who've been radicalized by Trump's immigrant crackdown are the real enemy.

Fox News' Will Cain: “There's a weird kind of smugness... in the way that some of these liberal white women interact with authority”

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— Media Matters for America (@mmfa.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 2:54 PM

Republicans are usually good at message discipline, and they're still good at one form of it: agreeing on the same narrative and banding together to push that narrative through every media channel possible. But discipline also means avoiding messages that exceed what the public is willing to hear. Republicans can't seem to do that anymore. They can't keep their hatreds in check, and because they live in a right-wing bubble, they think the country agrees with them.

On Renee Good's murder, it's not working, as CNN's Aaron Blake has noted:

The [latest] CNN poll shows 56% of US adults said the ICE agent’s use of force was “inappropriate,” compared to just 26% who said it was “appropriate.”

Similarly, Quinnipiac University and Yahoo News-YouGov polls released Tuesday tested whether people thought the shooting was “justified.” The former showed registered voters said it was “not justified” by 53%-35%, while the latter showed Americans said it wasn’t justified 52%-27%.

So three polls, all with margins of between 18 and 30 points against ICE. That’s a pretty decisive verdict in public opinion.

... it’s worth emphasizing that the Trump administration didn’t just say the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, was justified in shooting Good.

It went quite a bit further, immediately casting Good’s actions as “domestic terrorism” and saying she intentionally targeted the ICE agent with her car.

It’s looking pretty clear that that is out of step with the public’s interpretation of events.

The Yahoo-YouGov poll shows just 24% of Americans said Good was committing domestic terrorism. Only 52% of Republicans agreed with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on that.

Normal Americans don't hate Renee Good. Republicans are bizarre, hateful freaks who do. They've lost normal America with this. It was all supposed to be about legitimate targets for law enforcement. But Republicans can't control their hatred.

THE MEDIA STILL BELIEVES THERE ARE ONLY TWO AMERICAS

This New York Times story is typical of the mainstream media's coverage of public opinion:

One State, Two Very Different Views of Minneapolis

Pull up a stool at Ye Olde Pickle Factory and listen to a story about America’s urban-rural divide.

The regulars file into Ye Olde Pickle Factory in Nisswa, Minn., before 10 a.m. most days, taking their seats at the bar....

Nisswa is a town of about 2,000 people in the Brainerd Lakes Area, a popular summer vacation destination about 150 miles north of Minneapolis. Most of the regulars on hand this morning say they prefer not to go the city anymore. Not since the summer of 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by a police officer and the city erupted.

Now, Minneapolis is in the news again. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a woman, Renee Good, during an immigration operation last week, and demonstrators are back on the streets.

What did the regulars make of it?

Ms. Good’s death was tragic, they said. Horrific.

But they also said that she had asked for trouble.

“You obey the law officer,” a man in a veteran’s ball cap said, “and question it later.”

This is the divide, in a single sentence. In Minneapolis, protesters saw an innocent woman killed by a federal agent and took to the streets. At “the Pickle,” the regulars saw a woman who should have complied.

But that isn't "the divide." America isn't divided into two roughly equal segments, half rural and half urban, half Trumpist and half anti-Trumpist.

America consists of Democrats, Republicans, and independents. It's not true that everyone outside big liberal cities is a rock-ribbed rural Republican. On ICE right now, Republicans are overwhelmingly on President Trump's side, as you'd expect, and Democrats are overwhelmingly opposed to what Trump is doing, also as you'd expect. But independents are largely siding with Democrats, tipping overall public opinion against Trump.

Recently, when YouGov asked, "Do you think the ICE agent was justified or not justified in the amount of force he used in shooting the woman in Minneapolis?," 88% of Democrats said no and 61% of Republicans said yes. But the numbers among independents were 20% yes, 58% no. Overall, 53% of survey respondents said the shooting wasn't justified; 28% said it was.

YouGov also found that 53% of respondents think the shooter should face criminal charges. Democrats agree 90% to 4%; Republicans disagree, 14% to 63%. But independents largely side with Democrats, 54% to 23%.

We frequently see this split. In Quinnipiac's latest poll, 88% of Republicans and 3% of Democrats approve of how Trump is doing his job. But independents strongly disapprove -- 33% approve, 59% don't. Trump's overall approval rating is 40%, with 54% disapproving. Republicans are the outliers.

More than two-thirds of Republicans think the Trump administration should be running Venezuela, and approve of the U.S. taking over Venezuelan oil sales. But overall, poll respondents oppose the U.S. takeover 57% to 35%, and oppose a takeover of the oil sales 55% to 38%.

There are times when Republicans and independents agree on many issues and Democrats are the outliers, but this is not one of those times. The public is wary of both parties right now -- as John Guida notes in a Times interview with Kristen Soltis Anderson, who conducts most of the paper's focus groups, and Nate Silver, Gallup now finds that 45% of Americans identify as independents -- the highest percentage of self-described independents Gallup has ever recorded. "Young people in particular reject both parties," Guida notes. However, "if you count independents who lean toward a party, it is 47 percent Democratic and 42 percent Republican." Anderson says:

Republicans got a brief reprieve when Democrats ran a very, very old Joe Biden during a very, very tough economy for young people, and that combined with some backlash to overzealous progressivism among Gen Z got overstated into Republicans having won over a new generation. Behold how short-lived it was! Only 21 percent of millennials and 17 percent of Gen Z identifying as Republicans is bad, bad news for the G.O.P. over the long haul.

And Silver adds:

You also have a phenomenon where the Democratic brand is very unpopular, especially among younger voters who don’t have any institutional loyalty to it. So young liberals often identify as “independent” when you first ask them, but are independents who “lean Democratic” if a pollster pushes them to pick one of the two parties.

And yet Anderson's most recent Times focus group features eleven Trump fans -- who, you will be astonished to learn, think Trump is doing an awesome job as president.

The Times feeds us pro-Trump focus groups with the implication that this is how "the other half" thinks. But it's not the other half. It's a minority of the population -- and for now, independents and Democrats add up to an anti-Trump majority.