FOR TRUMP, PEDOPHILIA IS A CRIME OF OPPORTUNITY MORE THAN A CRIME OF PASSION

Even if you set aside the testimony of women who say that Donald Trump sexually assaulted them when they were teenagers, it's clear from other publicly available information that he likes young girls. He clearly spent a lot of time with Jeffrey Epstein -- we have many photos and video clips of the two of them together. He posed for creepy photos with his daughter Ivanka long before she became an adult, while calling her "hot" when she was just sixteen. Four Miss Teen USA contestants have said that he would walk into the contestants' dressing room when he owned the pageant, and Trump has admitted doing this at one pageant he owned, without specifying which one. And there's this:

There's also Trump's association in the early 1990s with the Elite Look of the Year contest, which provided opportunities for adult men to consort with and prey sexually upon teenage contestants.

But pedophilia doesn't seem to be Trump's main source of sexual gratification. When you look through his sexual history, most of the women involved seem to be adults. When he cheated on his first wife with the woman who'd be his second, Marla Maples, she was 26. He had an affair with Playboy model Karen McDougal starting when she was 25. His sexual encounter with pornstar Stormy Daniels took place when she was 27.

Michael Wolff claims to have hours of recorded interviews with Jeffrey Epstein, and he's played these recordings for Hugh Dougherty of The Daily Beast. The recording claim that in the time Trump and Epstein were friends, Trump's main kink was adultery:

On the tape Epstein can be heard saying, “He’s a horrible human being. He does nasty things to his best friends, best friends’ wives, anyone who he first tries to gain their trust and uses it to do bad things to them.”

On one occasion, Epstein alleged, Trump took a woman to what he called “the Egyptian Room” in an Atlantic City casino. Epstein alleged, “He came out afterward and said, ‘It was great, it was great. The only thing I really like to do is f--- the wives of my best friends. That is just the best.’”

And remember that the Access Hollywood tape focuses in part on Trump's interest in a married woman:

Unknown: "She used to be great, she's still very beautiful."

Trump: "I moved on her actually. You know she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I'll admit it. I did try and fuck her, she was married."

Unknown: "That's huge news there."

Trump: "No, no, Nancy. No this was [inaudible] and I moved on her very heavily in fact I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said I'll show you where they have some nice furniture. I moved on her like a bitch. I couldn't get there and she was married. Then all-of-a-sudden I see her, she's now got the big phony tits and everything. She's totally changed her look."

And then there's E. Jean Carroll, who was in her early fifties and divorced when Trump sexually assaulted her.

I don't think Trump is a pedophile in the sense that the desire for underage girls is an obsession for him. I think he prefers twentysomething women who are perceived as "hot." I also think he really likes adulterous sex. And it's clear that he gets off on sexual assault.

I'm sure we'll find that he forced himself on underage girls, but it doesn't seem to be his favorite thing to do, which almost makes it more reprehensible. To him it's just one of many decadent, transgressive power trips he has available to him, and it's not even his favorite one. And yet he undoubtedly did it anyway.

SORRY, I CAN'T LET THIS GO: WHY DO DEMOCRATS WANT TO MASTER EXACTLY THE WRONG KIND OF MESSAGING?

I don't mean to belabor this, but I was reading Politico Playbook again this morning (a bad habit, I know) and I realized something about Democratic messaging: It's not just that the party's leaders are bad at communicating with the public -- it's that they're trying to master exactly the wrong forms of communication.

Playbook reports today:

Can Democrats stay focused on a message that moves voters?

There is a certain allure animating Democrats’ Epstein trolling, even as it forces them to momentarily set aside their better-bet polling issues — like, say, focusing on Medicaid or the cost of living.

Of course, they can make a larger argument rolling the Epstein issue into what they characterize as Trump’s “billionaire protection racket” — and are doing just that.

How Dems are spinning it: “Republicans are literally shutting down the House floor and getting ready to go on vacation early just to weasel out of releasing the Epstein files,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement last night.... “While the American people elected leaders to fight for law and order and do their damn jobs, Republicans are bending the knee to Donald Trump and protecting an infamous sex trafficker.”

Apart from the painfulness of Ken Martin's attempt to sound tough, notice what he's trying to do here: he's trying to shoehorn multiple messages into a couple of sentences (law and order, plus congressional Republicans' subservience to Trump Epstein).

Another party spoksman weighs in:

Added DCCC spokesperson Viet Shelton, in a statement to Playbook: “The midterms are shaping up to be a referendum on who is going to lower costs and help improve the lives of everyday Americans, not the wealthy and well-connected.”

Do you remember what Al Franken used to say about the complexity of Democratic messages? “Our bumper stickers always end with ‘continued on next bumper sticker.’” It's as if Martin, Franken's fellow Minnesotan, has taken that criticism to heart and said, "I can get it all on one bumper sticker if we squeeze a lot of words onto the sticker by using really compressed type." Shelton is saying, "I can be even more concise by alluding to Epstein in a way that makes you unsure whether I'm alluding to Epstein or not. And I'm getting us back to the only issue Democrats believe that voters care about: the economy."

This Playbook passage begins, "Can Democrats stay focused on a message that moves voters?" The reference to "a message" is clearly a reflection of how Democrats see the task before them. But that isn't how messaging works in 2025 -- in fact, it's the exact opposite of how messaging works in 2025.

Democrats think they need to boil everything down to one concise message focused on one narrow set of issues. But Donald Trump throws everything at the wall -- arresting Barack Obama, challenging the Washington Commanders to change their name back to Redskins -- and while Democrats and independents aren't responding well in this Epstein moment, it's keeping Republicans faithful to him and pushing new subjects into the news cycle. That's because he and his people understand contemporary attention spans better than Democrats do.

The main messaging medium in contemporary politics isn't the bumper sticker or the concise thirty-second TV ad. It's the podcast or the video social media site -- TikTok, Instagram. I'm 66 years old. To me, the most zeitgeisty podcastsd seem endless. They go on for hours and hours. But they matter politically much more than TV or cable. Who's the one Democrat who actually went viral yesterday? Hunter Biden.

He tossed out so many different messages on so many different subjects:

Hunter Biden goes on a profanity laced rant about illegals being deported:

"People are really upset about illegal immigration? Fuck you. How do you think your hotel room gets cleaned? How do you think you have food on your fucking table? Who do you think washes your dishes?" pic.twitter.com/OETugq51H7

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 21, 2025

He did this on a podcast that was three hours long. This is how you communicate in the modern era. You don't try to boil your message down to one concise bumper sticker or one multi-subject aphorism that's a sentence or two in length. You just put yourself out there and have strong opinions about a lot of things, and wait for the gods of virality to sort through the best nuggets. This is also how TikTok works: people watch a thousand little videos and some of them break through, on a range of subjects. But they don't want one central message. They want a lot of little messages.

This is how Trump operates. He thinks he has something brilliant to say on many different subjects and he throws it all at you whenever it suits him. Right now, I'll acknowledge that he's desperately trying to change the subject -- but he's succeeding with his base, at least, because he came to this moment already knowing how to leap from subject to subject in a way that usually seems confident even if, to informed people, he sounds like an idiot.

Most Democrats don't know how to leap from subject to subject confidently, and the party as a whole certainly doesn't, and doesn't want to. So when Trump tries to change the subject, Democratic leaders scream "Distraction!" and ignore what he's saying or doing -- which leaves him as the only person talking about whatever subject he's discussing now.

Democrats should attack everything Trump says, and they should do some leaping from subject to subject themselves, trying to make news any way they can. When they don't do this, they seem to be conceding Trump's point every time they fail to challenge him. And when they try to squeeze the bizarreness of the world into one little bumper sticker the way Ken Martin does, they sound phony and boring. They should just hold forth. Hunter Biden understands that.

THE DEMOCRATIC MESSAGE MACHINE IS AS SLOW AND CREAKY AS EVER

This morning, Politico Playbook tells us about President Trump's efforts to message his way past the Jeffrey Epstein story:

Last night, the president posted on Truth Social more than two dozen times.

He posted phony mugshots of former President Barack Obama and an AI-generated video of the former president being arrested in the Oval Office before donning an orange jumpsuit in prison.

He posted about the Washington Commanders, demanding they change their name back to the Redskins and suggesting that he could blow up the RFK Stadium deal if they don’t....

He posted a three-minute, captionless video with clips of a bikini-clad woman picking up and tossing a snake; a man somersaulting around a dowel down a stairway; a red Lamborghini careening beneath a truck, Clark Griswold style; a man jumping a fence and coming face to face with a speeding train; a woman break dancing; an optical illusion of a conference room; a billiards trick; a man hacking away at some rock formation; a dirtbiker stunting on a trail; a jet ski....

That last one seems to be Trump's social media team mocking every Democrat who declares, huffily, that all non-monetary subjects are "distractions" from what's really important to American voters. See, for instance, Nancy Pelosi four days ago:

It's as if Trump's media people are saying, "Distraction? I got your distraction right here."

When this Pelosi clip appeared, a number of people from outside the Democratic establishment made an obvious point:

And today Playbook reports:

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) tells Playbook he’s now advising Democrats to “hammer the issue” ahead of the midterms by tying it to a broader critique of the administration: “Whose side are you on? Are you voting to protect rich and powerful men, or are you standing with America’s children and the people?”

I'm glad Khanna is saying this, but here are the Democrats in a nutshell: The administration announced that it wouldn't be releasing Epstein documents on July 7. It took one Democrat two weeks to link Trump's handling of the Epstein case to his administration's overall pro-elitist bias, and that Democrat still didn't make the connection to "kitchen table issues" explicit, and he's only now urging fellow Democrats to adopt this message. Why not two weeks ago? Why wasn't this the immediate response of dozens of Democrats? Why are they so slow and creaky?

Also note Trump's top "distraction":

It will probably take Democrats two or three weeks to respond to this, but could they consider responding maybe, y'know, now? Barack Obama is popular. Gallup says he's the most popular living president, with a 59%-36% approval rating. YouGov says that 61% of Americans have a positive opinion of him, and only 24% have a negative opinion.

Democrats, right now, could rally around a very popular Democrat. As I told you on Saturday, Trump is trying to target Obama based on the false idea that there was no Russian interference in the 2016 election. Americans distrust Vladimir Putin. Why not defend a popular Democrat and attack an unpopular foreign dictator? Trump might be over his mancrush on Putin, but it's been a joke for years -- even at kitchen tables! -- so why not attack him on this now?

Democrats won't. They'll freeze, like deer in headlights, as usual. Maybe in a few weeks they'll send another trial balloon to Politico Playbook about maybe, possibly, responding a certain way in the future. By that time, Obama might be sitting in a prison cell.

TRUMP IS SCUM, BUT SOME OF THE EVIDENCE OF HIS SCUMMINESS IS FAKE

Yesterday I san an unsettling pair of pictures in a couple of Reddit threads, one of which bore the headline "Trump kissing a teenage model in the 90s":

The first photo is real. It appears in this 2020 Guardian story and shows Trump -- in 1991, the year he turned 45 -- talking to a contestant in Elite Model Management's Look of the Year contest. The contestant looks very young -- it's not clear how young, but she was probably a teenager.

While Elite’s official brochure stated that contestants were aged between 14 and 24, all of those the Guardian has spoken to, competing in both years [1991 and 1992], were aged between 14 and 19.

The contest was the subject of a televised documentary.

In 1991 and 1992, the Elite contest was filmed for a 60-minute glossy television special, featuring interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, and later screened on Fox....

The 1992 Fox documentary reported that the average age was 15....

But the second photo of Trump and this contestant in the Guardian story was this:

A fact check from Lead Stories confirms that the kiss photo is fake. Yet we know that Trump has kissed at least one beauty pageant contestant on the lips -- Temple Taggart McDowell, Miss Utah 1997 -- because she told NBC News about it.



The Guardian story depicts some very sketchy behavior on Trump's part, and shows Trump consorting with men who are alleged to have committed sex crimes.

On 1 September 1991, a large private yacht cruised towards the Statue of Liberty.... Downstairs, a party was in flow. Scores of teenage girls in evening dresses and miniskirts, some as young as 14, danced under disco lights. It could have been a high school prom, were it not for the crowd of older men surrounding them.

As the evening wore on, some of the men – many old enough to be the girls’ fathers, or even grandfathers – joined them on the dancefloor, pressing themselves against the girls. One balding man in a suit wrapped his arms around two young models, leering into a film camera that was documenting the evening: “Can you get some beautiful women around me, please?”

The party aboard the Spirit of New York was one of several events that Donald Trump, then 45, attended with a group of 58 aspiring young models that September. They had travelled from around the world to compete in Elite’s Look of the Year competition....

In 1991, he was a headline sponsor, throwing open the Plaza, his lavish, chateau-style hotel overlooking Central Park, transforming it into the main venue and accommodating the young models. He was also one of its 10 judges.

In 1992, Trump hosted the competition again.

... the Guardian has spoken to several dozen former Look of the Year contestants, as well as industry insiders, and obtained 12 hours of previously unseen, behind-the-scenes footage. The stories we have heard suggest that Casablancas, and some of the men in his orbit, used the contest to engage in sexual relationships with vulnerable young models. Some of these allegations amount to sexual harassment, abuse or exploitation of teenage girls; others are more accurately described as rape.

But the kiss photo is fake, and it's not the only dubious item about Trump I found at Reddit yesterday. Another Redditor posted a thread with the headline

Reminder that Trump literally ran a 'high class' escort service, promising an experience 'exactly like a date with any girlfriend or loving wife'.

There's a link to an archived web page with this promotional copy:

Trump International offers elite, discreet and well bred travel companions to accompany you on your business trip, vacation or tour to any major city worldwide. (Five star only) Most of the travel companions are experienced, confident travelers, and they are all able to accommodate the trip with a calm, cheerful attitude....

Our ultimate aim is to ensure both you and the model have a wonderful, beautiful experience together. To help select the most appropriate model to join you, we'll consult with you about your preferences, and ensure your perfect woman is available....

These are first class companions in every way, carefully selected for you. And we don't just say ‘carefully selected’ lightly; Our applicants are taken through a rigorous selection and interview process to ensure they possess the minimum quality requirements we expect, based on our clients’ expectations.

But as Philip Bump reported in The Washington Post in 2016, the company promting itself as Trump Escorts had no connection to Trump -- the domain name had been registered to an Australian company called Bestcom International since 2007, the mailing address appeared to match a Trump property but was incorrect, and by the time of Bump's investigation, the escort agency had changed its name to Mystique Companions.

If there'd actually been a Trump escort agency, we'd know about it. I no longer believe that it would have been enough to prevent him from winning the presidency, but we'd at least know some details about it. Its activities would have been reported.

Donald Trump is a degenerate, but I don't believe that fake evidence of his degeneracy will help bring him to justice. There's a chance that it will discredit legitimate evidence. Never doubt that Trump is a horrible person, but approach stories about his past with some skepticism.

MAGA HAS ALREADY MOVED ON FROM EPSTEIN

I think Justin Baragona is right:

More than a week after Donald Trump’s base looked like it might be fracturing over the Justice Department’s “no client list” Jeffrey Epstein memo, MAGA world got its “perfect offramp” in the ongoing saga thanks to the Wall Street Journal’s latest bombshell.

... the WSJ’s story ... offered MAGA pundits and influencers the chance to join Trump in lambasting their shared enemy – the mainstream press.

The Journal story says that Trump sketched an image of a naked woman for an Epstein birthday greeting, and toasted Epstein with an imagined dialogue between Epstein and himself. Trump says he doesn't draw sketches, even though several of his sketches have been made public over the years. Trump is on stronger ground when he says that the message doesn't match his writing style, which we all now know from thousands of social media messages, as well as Trump-era government documents, which seem partially written by Trump himself. The prose of the Epstein greeting doesn't seem Trumpian, but please note that Trump had published four books by the time of the 2003 greeting, none of which he wrote himself, and he would publish three more in 2004, the year The Apprentice first aired. So he was used to working with ghostwriters.

Nevertheless, as Baragona notes, the semi-plausible claim that the greeting is fake seems to be uniting MAGA influencers around Trump:

With the president going off about how he was “going to sue his a** off” over the “FAKE letter,” whatever schism that had formed in the MAGA universe over the administration’s handling of the Epstein files quickly melted away as prominent conservative personalities jumped onboard the media hate train....

“This is the dumbest attempted hit piece I’ve ever read,” fumed Megyn Kelly, who just days earlier had blasted Fox News hosts and MAGA influencers for trying to move on from the Epstein controversy....

Former “first buddy” Elon Musk, who has said the administration’s conclusion that Epstein died by suicide and didn’t maintain a “client list” was the “final straw” for him, also came to the president’s defense over the WSJ's “hit piece.” ...

Podcaster and serial plagiarist Benny Johnson, who has been at the forefront of pushing the administration to release more Epstein documents amid the MAGA meltdown, unleashed a series of posts raging about the WSJ while peddling conspiracies about the paper’s reporting.

So Epstein and his circle are no longer the enemy. The media is the enemy.

What's MAGA's new focus? It might be this, the subject of the two top stories at Gateway Pundit right now:

A story that featured prominently at Breitbart this morning explains:

Republican lawmakers delivered a thunderous response following Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s explosive declassification of documents proving the Obama administration deliberately manufactured intelligence to create the false Trump-Russia collusion narrative, with revelations that expose what one Republican described as a disinformation campaign against the American people that “makes Watergate look like amateur hour.”

The declassified documents reveal that a December 8, 2016 Presidential Daily Brief stated that Russian actors “did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure,” but Obama administration officials suppressed this assessment and ordered intelligence agencies to create a new narrative that “directly contradicted” their original findings. The bombshell revelations prompted an immediate and furious response from Republican leaders on Friday....

DISMANTLING THE DEEP STATE!

New evidence from @DNIGabbard confirms what we’ve long known: The Russia hoax was a political hit job manufactured by Obama officials and weaponized by intel agencies to take down President Trump.

Accountability is long overdue! https://t.co/9NWoeds0nD

— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) July 18, 2025

If you go to the link in the excerpt above, there's not much real news:

“We assess that Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure,” a declassified December 8, 2016 Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) that was set to be published the next day stated.

... intelligence officials said election monitoring combined with the fact that neither vote-counting nor -casting infrastructures were harmed made it “highly unlikely” that any results were altered.

But the Trump-Russia scandal was about efforts to influence voters, not create fake votes or vote counts.

Nevertheless, Gateway Pundit reports that Steve Bannon ranted yesterday on his podcast about incarcerating large numbers of Obama-era officials:

This is how duplicitous they are. This is how guilty they are. Ben Rhodes, Obama, all of them are going to rot in a freaking prison. This is why we got to get on top of this. This is the deep state. This is the coup against Trump. You can see it all right there.

This is all MAGA wants. Trump's voters think they care about child abise, but what they really care about is putting all their political enemies in jail. If they now believe, naively, that this is a more likely route to that end, they're perfectly willing to forget about the Epstein story. Besides, how can the Epstein story give them the satisfaction they want when liberals are expressing disgust at what he and his friends did? MAGA can't side with us -- ever!

This might not be the off-ramp MAGA needs, but MAGA is largely done with Epstein.

ATTACKING ISRAEL: IT'S OKAY IF YOU'RE A REPUBLICAN

You might not have noticed this because of all the attention being paid to the Jeffrey Epstein story, but Donald Trump's ambassador has been sharply critical of Israel recently, in ways that would have led to screaming headlines and loud denunciations if similar messages had been sent by a Democratic administration.

First, there was this story on Tuesday:

The United States ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, on Tuesday called on the Israeli authorities to “aggressively investigate” the death of a 20-year-old Palestinian-American citizen in a clash on Friday with Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, calling his killing a “murder” and a “criminal and terrorist act.”

Mr. Huckabee, who has been vocal about his support for settlement in the occupied West Bank — which is widely viewed as illegal in the international community — used uncharacteristically strong language in his statement condemning the death of Sayfollah Musallet, a young Floridian who had been visiting his family in the area.

“There must be accountability for this criminal and terrorist act,” Mr. Huckabee said.

Responsibility for this killing doesn't really seem to be in doubt -- an NPR story on it was unambiguously headlined "Israeli Settlers Beat U.S. Citizen to Death in West Bank," and even Hakeem Jeffries condemned the killing. But now there's this from Huckabee:

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has threatened to publicly declare that Israel no longer welcomes Christian groups to Israel over what he said was Jerusalem’s failure to approve tourist visas for evangelical missions.

The threat was issued in a letter that Huckabee sent on Wednesday to Interior Minister Moshe Arbel, which was leaked to Hebrew media on Thursday....

Given Huckabee’s longstanding support for Israel and close ties with the current government in particular, the rhetoric in his letter represented a shockingly quick deterioration.

The letter is quite harsh:

“It would be very unfortunate that our embassy would have to publicly announce throughout the United States that the State of Israel is no longer welcoming Christian organizations and their representatives and is instead engaging in harassment and negative treatment toward organizations with long-standing relationships and positive involvement toward Zionism and friendship to the Jewish people and the State of Israel,” the US envoy wrote....

“If the government of Israel continues to cause the expense and bureaucratic harassment for the granting of routine visas that for decades have been routine, I will have no other choice than to instruct our consular section to review options for reciprocal treatment of Israeli citizens seeking visas to the United States,” Huckabee warned.

More:

"We would be further obligated to warn Christians in America that their generous contributions to organizations to promote goodwill in Israel are being met with hostility and that tourists should reconsider travel until this situation is resolved with clarity."

But Zohnran Mamdani is still evil, apparently.

Or perhaps the Overton window has moved a millimeter to the left. A couple of days ago, Axios reported that two purple-state Democrats have now criticized Israel (one of them very timidly):

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a moderate Democrat from a swing state, this week slammed the Israeli government for the lack of humanitarian aid in Gaza and violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Slotkin wrote on X:

Another violent week in the Middle East: in Gaza, this weekend brought the death of another 60 Palestinians who were simply seeking food and water for their families. Israel has the responsibility to allow humanitarian aid in — just as the US had the responsibility to allow aid into places like Fallujah. And if President Trump’s hand-picked aid organization can’t get food and medicine to people in Gaza a safe way, Israel has the responsibility to find one that can.

In the West Bank, Israeli settlers beat a Palestinian-American U.S. citizen to death. This totals 5 Americans killed in the West Bank since October 7, 2023 and more than a dozen Palestinians killed by lawless settler violence. It’s hard to understand this lack of accountability by the Netanyahu government as anything other than tacit approval by the state — something that should be treated as abhorrent by all decent people.

This violence has to end. As I saw from my own experience in places like Iraq, democratic governments have responsibilities even when under threat. If President Trump and his team truly want a lasting ceasefire (not to mention a Nobel Peace Prize), they need to extract basic humanitarian and law and order standards now.

That's fairly strong, but this is weak tea:

"There are times when, to me, it doesn't look like [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] is prioritizing the hostage situation," Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told Axios. "Certainly, there's times when it looks like Hamas does not want a deal."

But maybe it's a start. Nevertheless, I'm sure we'll continue to hear that Zohran Mamdani is a dangerous Jew-hating terrorist who must be stopped by any means necessary.

THE CRAZIFICATION FACTOR IS MUCH HIGHER THAN 27% NOW

A 2005 post from the blog Kung Fu Monkey declared that the popularity of a Republican politician or idea couldn't drop below 27%. It was written in the form of a dialogue, at a time when there was a notable decline in President George W. Bush's job approval rating:

John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval.... But I wonder what his base is --

Tyrone: 27%.

John: ... you said that immmediately, and with some authority.

Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

Twenty years later, I think 27% is a low estimate. In this decade, the crazification factor appears to be 40%.

Kung Fu Monkey was more or less right about the 27% figure two decades ago. Bush's job approval was between 27% and 29% in eleven Gallup polls in 2008, and dropped to 25% in two polls. He had mismanaged the economy, two wars, and a major hurricane.

Now compare the polling for Donald Trump in the immediate aftermath of his 2020 election defeat and the January 6 insurrection:

Even after January 6 -- which was, briefly, the object of bipartisan condemnation -- Trump ended his term with a 41.1% job approval rating. In that post-January 6 period, he never dipped below 39.3% in the Real Clear Politics average.

In Trump's second term, the public is dissatisfied with his handling of every major issue -- but his approval is above 39% on all of them, according to Real Clear:

Economy: approve 42.9%, disapprove 54.3% (-11.4%)

Foreign policy: approve 42.3%, disapprove 54.5% (-12.2%)

Immigration: approve 46.9%, disapprove 50.4% (-3.5%)

Inflation: approve 39.3%, disapprove 59.5% (-20.2%)

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: approve 42.0%, disapprove 48.8% (-6.8)

And his overall job approval is still in the 44%-46% range. Here are the polls Nate Silver cites:

There's one below 40%, but just barely.

You might be waiting for the Jeffrey Epstein case to drag Trump's poll numbers down further, but the latest polling from YouGov shows that Trump's job approval is 41%, even though 67% of survey respondents have little or no confidence in the Epstein investigations and 40% believe Trump was involved in Epstein's crimes.

(According to YouGov, Trump's approval rating remains at 98% among MAGA Republicans and has actually increased, to 85%, among non-MAGA Republicans. So much for the possibility of signifcant base defections. There is a noticeable decline in support from independents, however, from 35% to 29% this month.)

In establishing a baseline for the crazification factor, the Kung Fu Monkey post cited the 2004 Illinois Senate election, in which crazy Alan Keyes won 27.05% of the vote against Barack Obama. I think the modern election we should look at the 2024 North Carolina gubernatorial contest. Even after the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, was found to have posted many offensive and/or sexually explicit messages on a porn bulletin board ("I'm a black NAZI!"), he received 40.08% of the vote. It's hard to imagine a worse candidate than Robinson, but millions of North Carolinians voted for him anyway.

It's comforting to think that all but a quarter of the country could turn against a Republican, but I don't think that's true anymore. Three out of five seems to be the best we can do now.