Trump Blows Up After Onslaught of Devastating Polls

Trump posted through the pain after a series of devastating national polls showed his approval rating quickly plummeting after his first month in office.

“I won the Presidential Election in a landslide, won ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, THE POPULAR VOTE, AND ALL FIFTY STATES SHIFTED REPUBLICAN, a record, and now I have the best polling numbers I’ve ever had,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday, seemingly in response to the news this week. “The Democrats, run by broken down losers like James Carville, whose weak of mind and body, are going crazy, and just don’t know what to do. They have lost their confidence and spirit - They have lost their minds! We are going to have big WINS for our Country, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. It’s already happening, and will get bigger and better than ever before!”

A CNN poll published Thursday found that just 47 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance, while 52 percent disapprove. Moreover, 55 percent of respondents don’t think he’s focused enough on the most pressing issues in the U.S., and 62 percent don’t think he’s done enough to bring the costs of common goods down.

The Washington Post and Gallup released similarly negative results this week. The Post-Ipsos poll found that 57 percent of Americans thought that Trump was “exceeding his authority” and that 48 percent opposed his actions outright. Gallup’s poll showed that 51 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump.

According to CNN, about half the country (52 percent) also thinks Trump has gone too far with his executive power, and about half (48 percent) think he’s gone too far with the federal purge and DOGE overhaul. If this is how Trump is reacting to mostly normal polling numbers in month one, there’s no telling how he’ll be reacting to criticism after a year or two.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is once again lying about how much money it’s saving for American taxpayers, The Intercept reported Friday.

DOGE’s wonky wall of receipts claimed that it saved $231,864,794 by cancelling an I.T. contract between the Social Security Administration and Leidos, an engineering company. DOGE claimed the total value of the contract was $1,033,638,089.

The Social Security Administration confirmed to The Intercept that the real savings were limited to work on the Gender X Marker Project, which sought to add ‘X’ as a gender option on U.S. passports. The project was canceled last month as part of Trump’s anti-trans executive order insisting the federal government would only recognize two genders. At the time, DOGE claimed canceling the contract could save the government more than $1 million.

But DOGE’s cut didn’t save the government $1 million, let alone the nearly $232 million the agency now claims on its website. In reality, the cut only saved $560,000, a spokesperson from the Social Security Administration told The Intercept.

“The task order referenced on the DOGE receipt website includes numerous I.T. development efforts, one of which was Social Security’s former Gender X Marker project,” Darren Lutz, the SSA spokesperson, said. “While the overarching task order was not terminated, we continue to assess and identify other projects under this task order that may be cancelled or streamlined to create further cost savings.”

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the head of government affairs at the watchdog Project on Government Oversight, slammed DOGE’s sloppy work.

“This, to me, is just part and parcel of the amateur-hour nature of what DOGE is doing,” he told The Intercept. “They’re going to destroy more than they help. It’s absolutely counterproductive.”

Earlier this week, it was discovered that DOGE somehow added a couple of zeroes when claiming to have cut one ICE contract worth $8 billion. In actuality, the contract was worth only $8 million. Even as DOGE’s accounting discrepancies are uncovered, the total savings touted by DOGE on its website remains at $55 billion—and that number becomes more dubious with every passing day.

The Trump administration’s Federal Aviation Administration firings are much worse than they initially let on.

Politico has reported that the 130 terminated FAA workers last month included critical employees who directly and indirectly reinforce all of the FAA’s moving parts to keep passengers safe. The Trump White House had previously stated that no “critical” employees had been fired.

Concerns about aviation safety have been compounded since 67 people were killed when a passenger plane collided with an Army helicopter at DCA outside Washington, D.C., in January.

“I would argue that every job at the FAA right now is safety critical,” aviation safety consultant Jeff Guzzetti told Politico. The firings “certainly [are] not going to improve safety — it can only increase the risk.”

One recently fired employee was an aeronautical information specialist who helped plan airplane routes, or “highways in the sky.”

“Air traffic controllers cannot do their work without us,” the employee said anonymously to Politico on Wednesday. They went on to state that their fellow FAA workers were “targeted just as a senseless line item on an Excel sheet.”

“To put it frankly, without our team ... pilots would quite literally be flying blind,” they said.

The Rolling Stone’s Andrew Perez reported that other cut positions included “lawyers who help keep drunk or reckless pilots out of the skies,” “employees who track potential new flying hazards like cranes,” and staffers in charge of medically clearing pilots.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and the White House provided no actual specifics regarding what positions were emptied. Rather, they chose to talk down to Americans who just want to be assured that their next flight will land safely.

“No air traffic controllers nor any professionals who perform safety critical functions were terminated,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, directly contradicting Politico’s reporting. The FAA is already understaffed.

Now that he’s back in office, Donald Trump is looking to finalize one of his former agenda items: nixing the United States Postal Service.

The president is expected to issue an executive order “as soon as this week” that would dissolve the Postal Service’s governing board and place it under the control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to several sources that spoke with The Washington Post in a story published Thursday.

During an emergency meeting on Thursday, the postal board issued instructions to sue the White House should it attempt to remove members of the board or alter its independent status, the Post reported. Two of the group’s Republican members—former Trump official Derek Kan and former RNC Chair Mike Duncan—were conspicuously absent during the meeting.

Restructuring USPS into the folds of the Commerce Department would probably violate federal law, according to postal experts that spoke with the Post.

The U.S. Postal Service is practically as old as the country. It was developed by the Second Continental Congress during the American Revolution, and Benjamin Franklin was appointed as its first postmaster general.

Since then, the Postal Service has reinvented itself again and again, keeping up with the myriad shipping demands of the American public and supporting trillions of dollars in commerce.

It also “generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations,” according to USPS’s website.

Still, that hasn’t prevented America’s public mail system from becoming a favorite target of the president. In 2020, Trump argued that the Postal Service should be dismantled to prevent voting by mail. That was in the throes of Covid-19, when the agency asked Congress for a $25 billion cash injection to offset losses caused by the pandemic.

That trend has continued through the decade, though the agency’s losses have been slightly less egregious. In November, USPS said it had lost $9.5 billion in the prior fiscal year—$3 billion more than it did in 2023—blaming noncash contributions to workers’ compensation for the bulk of the deficit.

The agency, which is in the midst of a 10-year overhaul, has reportedly made regaining its financial footing a chief priority. Still, the path ahead is not an obvious one. In November, Postmaster Louis DeJoy (a Trump appointee) warned that there would be “many economic, legislative, and regulatory obstacles for us to overcome.”

Meanwhile, Trump and his allies are slashing and hacking federal programs in order to afford an extension to his 2017 tax plan, which will overwhelmingly benefit corporations and is projected to add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit.

A Republican member of Congress thinks that Donald Trump’s executive order spree has gone too far.

Representative Troy Balderson, whose district comprises areas in central and southeastern Ohio, said Thursday that the president’s orders are “getting out of control,” adding that Trump and Elon Musk are exceeding their authority.

“Congress has to decide whether or not the Department of Education goes away,” said Balderson at the Westerville Area Chamber’s business luncheon. “Not the president, not Elon Musk. Congress decides.”

Balderson said that he respected Trump, the need for executive orders, and the right to investigate government agencies, but that “Congress has to do their work.” The congressman was endorsed by Trump since his first run for Congress in 2018, in a district that has voted Republican going back at least 46 years, so his opinion shows that Trump’s actions are becoming unpopular even among Republicans.

Trump’s new commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, confirmed Wednesday that the president plans to make cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, all programs that are popular with Republicans as well as Democrats. If Trump follows through on those cuts, Republican voters in areas like Balderson’s district could lose patience with Trump and the GOP by the time the 2026 midterm elections come up, and perhaps even in 2028.