Not One Member of Trump’s Administration Is Popular, Brutal Poll Shows

The Trump administration has not won over the hearts of America.

Instead, approval ratings among independents for the chief members of the president and his Cabinet have dropped to a two-to-one negative ratio, according to a Quinnipiac poll published Wednesday.

In that bracket, Donald Trump received a 29 percent approval rating, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received a 28 percent approval rating, FBI Director Kash Patel received a 26 percent approval rating, Attorney General Pam Bondi received a 21 percent approval rating, and FCC Chair Brendan Carr received an abysmal 14 percent approval rating.

Their numbers were not much improved when all voters were taken into account. Trump’s total job approval was just 38 percent; Kennedy’s was 33 percent, as was Patel’s; Bondi’s was 30 percent; and just 19 percent of the country approved of the way that Carr is utilizing his office.

In the same poll, nearly eight in 10 voters agreed that the country is in a “political crisis.” The most pressing issue in the United States, according to the bulk of voters, is “preserving democracy.” Just 24 percent of surveyed Americans said that they were “satisfied” with the way that things are going in the country.

Political violence also took a front seat as a critical issue facing the nation. In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, 54 percent of queried voters said that they believed political violence would “worsen” over the next few years. That was compared to 14 percent of voters who said it would “ease” and 27 percent who believed that the current level of political violence affecting America would “remain the same.”

Their perspective on America’s political future was similarly bleak. Just 34 percent of the surveyed registered voters believed that it would be possible to lower the temperature of political rhetoric in the country—as opposed to 58 percent who reported that there wasn’t a shot in hell.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro this week called for criminal proceedings against Donald Trump, whom he compared to Adolf Hitler while speaking before the United Nations General Assembly.

In Petro’s final speech before the U.N. in New York on Tuesday, he observed (according to a live translation from the U.N.) that the world is in a “different situation” than it was when he first addressed the international body in 2022.

“The old societies of Europe are collapsing,” he said, “and the United States is applauding its new Hitler. It’s not listening to its own young people, or its older people who died in the battlefields of Europe, fighting against Hitler and against his criminal ideology. Today, the same thing is being done as Hitler did, building concentration camps for migrants, and it’s stated that migrants are of an inferior race, and they blame them just like Hitler blamed the Jews. They call them drug traffickers and thieves.”

In stressing the need for climate action, Petro said of Trump: “The most powerful man in the world does not believe in science. That is irrationality. And Germany, the country of great philosophers, of Kant, Feuerbach, and others, became prey of irrationalism in 1933, and today it’s this country that is becoming irrational. The solution is to stop consuming fossil fuels and to quickly switch to water, wind, hydrogen.”

He also described Trump as “an accomplice to genocide” in Gaza. “This forum,” he said of the U.N., “is a mute witness to a genocide, in a world where we thought that this was something only a legacy of Hitler.”

“A kind of stone age,” he said earlier in his remarks, has seemingly “descended on all of humankind”—citing inaction on the climate crisis, Trump’s strikes on “unarmed young people in the Caribbean,” Israeli strikes “that have killed some 70,000 people in Gaza,” and “the persecution, imprisonment, and expulsion of millions of migrants.”

The Colombian president denied Trump’s claim that the people on the Venezuelan boats the U.S. bombed (on shaky legal ground) earlier this month were trafficking drugs. “They said that the missiles in the Caribbean were used to stop drug trafficking,” Petro said. “That is a lie.”

“There should be criminal cases against those officials of the United States for doing this, including the utmost official, President Trump,” he said, “that allowed the shooting of missiles against these young people who were simply trying to escape poverty”—who “might have had a certain amount of drugs,” he added, but “were not drug traffickers.”

The U.S. mainstream media, for its part, has largely ignored his comments.

Every living former chair of the Federal Reserve Bank agrees that the Supreme Court should prevent President Donald Trump’s effort to oust Fed Governor Lisa Cook.

An amicus brief filed Thursday argued that removing Cook would “threaten [the] independence and erode public confidence in the Fed,” and stressed the historical importance of the agency’s freedom from political considerations.

“The independence of the Federal Reserve, within the limited authority granted by Congress to achieve the goals Congress itself has set, is a critical feature of our national monetary system,” the brief said.

The brief’s signatories represented decades of expertise on economic policy, and crossed political boundaries. They included former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, who is 99 years old, as well as Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. The brief was also signed by former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Jack Lew, Timothy Geithner, and Hank Paulson, a Republican. Multiple former chairs of the White House Council of Economic Advisers also lent their support, including Greg Mankiw, Christina Romer, Cecilia Rouse, Jared Bernstein, Jason Furman, and Glenn Hubbard, another Republican.

Phil Gramm, a Republican who previously served as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, signed the brief as well, as did economists Ken Rogoff and John Cochrane.

Last week, Trump’s lawyer went running to the Supreme Court with a request to stay an appeals court decision keeping Cook in place. The appeals court said that Cook was likely to succeed in her statutory claim that she’d been fired without “cause,” as well as her procedural claim that she did not receive her due process prior to her removal. But attorney John Sauer argued that she was not entitled to due process, and that Trump has a sweeping discretion to fire whomever he wanted as long as he claimed it was related to their job.

President Donald Trump blamed “radical left Democrats” for recent violence, and warned that they were asking for trouble from their counterparts on the right.

Speaking to the press in the Oval Office Thursday, Trump was asked who he blamed for an “uptick” in violence. The reporter cited the Wednesday shooting at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Dallas, where the shooter reportedly left a note saying he hoped to inspire “real terror” in ICE agents.

“The radical left is causing the problem,” Trump replied. “They’re out of control. They’re saying things, and they’re really dumb people.”

Trump pointed to Representative Jasmine Crockett, a firebrand Democrat from Texas, who has pushed for more aggressive criticism of Trump, calling him a “piece of shit.” Earlier this month, Crockett criticized the administration for targeting Democratic cities with large Black populations, and likened ICE raids to modern day “slave patrols.”

Meanwhile, MAGA has always lauded Trump for speaking “authentically,” and ignored his use of violent language.

“It’s gonna get worse, and ultimately it’s going to go back on them. I mean bad things happen when they play these games” Trump warned. “And uh, I’ll give you a little clue. The right is a lot tougher than the left. But the right’s not doing this, they’re not doing it. And they better not get them energized, because it won’t be good for the left.

“And it’ll be a point where other people won’t take it anymore, and that will not be good for the radical left,” Trump added.

Trump’s framing conveniently ignores that the most recent shooting is in itself a response to right-wing violence: specifically, sweeping extrajudicial deportations carried out by masked agents directed by a far-right regime. State violence begets violence, as push comes to shove. And Trump’s own rhetoric has done little to lower the temperature.

Trump has also turned a blind eye toward violence targeting Democrats, including the shooting of two Democratic Minnesota state lawmakers in June, one of whom died. The deaths of state Representative Melissa Hortman, her husband, and their dog received little notice from the administration, and certainly no national holiday.

President Trump joked about rigged elections at the start of his press conference with Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan, who has amassed power in Turkey for over two decades. 

“It’s a pleasure to be with President Erdoğan of Turkey, and we’ve been friends for a long time, actually, even for four years when I was in exile unfairly, as it turns out, rigged elections, you know,” Trump said on Thursday. “He knows about rigged elections better than anybody, but when I was in exile, we were still friends.” 

This is yet another example of Trump’s affinity for strongman authoritarian leaders with sketchy records on political transparency, human rights, and free speech, from El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, to Erdoğan. 

Erdoğan first became prime minister of Turkey in 2003. Since then, he has jailed students, protesters (for things like throwing eggs), and hundreds of journalists. He has briefly blocked access to Wikipedia and nearly every social media platform and has overseen the Turkish Great Depression, all while hanging giant banners of himself throughout the country. (Sound familiar?)  

Most recently, Erdoğan arrested well-known opposition leader and political rival Ekrem Imamoglu on the grounds that he accepted bribes and rigged bids. Given Erdoğan’s history, it’s extremely likely that Imamoglu was arrested because he represents a serious threat to Erdoğan’s reign, even in the face of outright suppression and election rigging. 

Each thing listed here—muzzling journalists, cracking down on protesters, jailing political rivals, hoarding power for decades—is something Trump has already done or professed his desire to do. It’s no wonder he feels such a kinship with Erdoğan. 

Additionally, Trump referring to his losing the 2020 election and inciting a violent insurrection as his “exile” is rich. Let’s hope he doesn’t take any more notes from Erdoğan for 2028.