Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Trump's Current Net Job Approval Is Negative 18
These charts are from Economist / YouGov Polls done between January 26th and April 27th. Each poll would have a margin of error of about 3 points.
Americans Overwhelmingly Support Birthright Citizenship
The chart above is from the Reuters / Ipsos Poll -- done between April 15th and 20th of a nationwide sample of 4,557 adults, with a 2 point margin of error.
Why Don't Republicans Do Anything That Would Help Workers?
The following is from Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:
Why have Republicans avoided doing anything at all to help average working people for over 40 years?
Q. Why do Republicans fight free college and ending student debt when our experience with the GI Bill after WWII found that for every $1 we invest in educating people our nation got $7 in return, as well as making America the science leader of the late 20th century?
A. Because the GOP is on the take from the banking industry, which makes billions in profits from student loans that are almost entirely risk-free because — thanks to legislation signed by George W. Bush — they can’t be discharged by bankruptcy.
Q. Why do Republicans fight every effort to have a national healthcare system like every other democracy in the world has, even though it would save tens of thousands of lives a year, lengthen the average American lifespan, and cost us around half of what we pay for healthcare today?
A. Because the GOP is on the take from the health insurance industry, which makes billions in profits from denying coverage to people, even though 78 million Americans have inadequate or no insurance and a national system would save the country an estimated half-billion dollars a year. As Wendell Potter notes, “In 2024, seven big insurers posted $71.3 billion in profits and paid their [seven] CEOs more than $146 million.”
Q. Why do Republicans sabotage green programs designed to get America off our dependence on fossil fuels, when fossil fuels are destroying our atmosphere, our children’s future, and cause tens of thousands of cancers and millions of cases of asthma and other disease cases every year?
A. Because the GOP is on the take from the fossil fuel industry, which makes billions in profits every year and recycles some of that back to the Party. In 2024 the world’s largest, most polluting companies recording an estimated $583 billion in profits, marking a 68% increase since 2019 in part because of their investment in buying American Republican politicians.
Q. Why do Republicans fight breaking up monopolies, even though the average American family pays around $5000 a year more for goods and services than do the citizens of most other democracies that don’t allow monopolies and oligopolies?
A. Because the GOP is on the take from giant, monopolistic companies, as I lay out in horrifying detail in The Hidden History of American Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream (foreword by Ralph Nader). Every time a Democratic president tries to take on the monopolies — as Biden most recently did by hiring Lina Kahn to run the FTC — Republicans support lawsuits that postpone the breakups until a Republican president can fire the FTC head, install a corporate toady, and drop the case.
Q. Why do Republicans fight letting Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices, even though every other developed nation does it and Americans typically pay two to ten times more for the same medicines?
A. Because the GOP is on the take from the pharmaceutical industry, which has poured hundreds of millions into the party for decades. Big Pharma’s obscene profits depend on Americans paying the highest drug prices in the world, so Republicans consistently oppose any reforms that would let Medicare use its buying power to bring costs down.
Q. Why do Republicans oppose expanding Social Security benefits and protecting the program by lifting the payroll tax cap on billionaires, even though millions of seniors rely on it as their primary income and lifting the cap would make the program solvent for the next 75 years?
A. Because the GOP is on the take from Wall Street, which has long dreamed of privatizing Social Security so giant investment firms can skim management fees from the trillions in the Social Security Trust Fund. Every dollar kept in the public Social Security system is a dollar the financial industry can’t turn into profit.
Q. Why do Republicans battle against universal paid family leave and paid sick leave, even though every other advanced democracy guarantees workers time to care for a newborn, a sick spouse, or themselves and paid sick leave helps prevent the spread of disease?
A. Because the GOP is on the take from low-pay corporate employers who want labor as cheap and disposable as possible. Paid leave shifts a tiny share of corporate wealth back to workers, so the Chamber of Commerce and big business and its political allies pour millions into Republican coffers and campaigns to block it.
Q. Why do Republicans oppose raising the minimum wage, even though productivity has soared for decades while wages have stagnated and the corporate owners are richer than at any time in world history?
A. Because the GOP is on the take from giant retail chains, fast-food corporations, and other low-wage employers whose profits depend on paying people less than a living wage. Keeping wages low forces us taxpayers to subsidize their workers through food stamps, Medicaid, and housing aid while their morbidly rich executives pocket the difference.
Q. Why do Republicans fight food assistance programs like SNAP and universal free school lunches, even though childhood hunger damages learning, health, and lifetime earning potential and research proves these programs are among the most efficient anti-poverty investments any government can make?
A. Because the GOP is on the take from billionaires and low-wage corporations that depend on keeping wages so low workers still need public help to feed their families. SNAP and school lunch programs expose the truth that millions of Americans are working full-time jobs that don’t pay enough to live on. Rather than force employers to raise wages, Republicans would rather let children go hungry and blame the poor for being poor.
Q. Why do Republicans fight stronger gun safety laws supported by large majorities of Americans, even including things as anodyne as universal background checks and red-flag laws?
A. Because the GOP is on the take from the gun industry and its lobbying arm, the NRA, which make fortunes every time a new round of Republican-pushed fear drives firearm sales. Dead children in classrooms are the tragic collateral damage to this business model built on lies about the Second Amendment and political bribery.
Q. Why do Republicans oppose cracking down on tax havens and making billionaires pay what they owe, even though it would reduce deficits, pay down our national debt, and fund schools, roads, and healthcare?
A. Because the GOP is on the take from the billionaires, hedge funds, and multinational corporations that bankroll their campaigns. If you add up the tax cuts for the rich by Reagan, Bush, and Trump they equal more than our entire national debt of $38 trillion, meaning all that money — that we pay a trillion dollars a year in interest on that could instead fund a national healthcare system, free college, and an end to homelessness — was borrowed in our name by the GOP to give to the Zuckerbergs, Musks, and Bezos’ of the world.
Q. Why do Republicans so frequently use hate and fear — from Willy Horton to Trump’s anti-trans ads to hysteria about bathrooms — to win political campaigns, and why do billionaires and corporations fund such advertising?
A. Because such type of campaigning has such a powerful emotional load it causes people to forget how the GOP has been screwing them for the past half-century.
Thus, we discover that the mystery of modern Republican politics isn’t really a mystery at all.
When a party consistently blocks cheaper medicine, better wages, paid leave, affordable college, clean energy, antitrust enforcement, and healthcare that works, it’s not because those ideas are unpopular or unworkable: it’s because they threaten the obscene profits of the industries and the billionaires writing the checks.
Until we get big money out of politics and make Congress answerable to citizens instead of donors, the GOP will remain what it has become since the Reagan Revolution: not a political party with ideas to improve America and working people, but a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporations and billionaires while Americans die young and remain uneducated, underfed, and unhoused.
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Most Say Trump's Decision To Go To War With Iran Was Wrong
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between April 17th and 20th of a nationwide sample of 1,707 adults (including 1,553 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.3 points for adults and 3.1 points for registered voters.
Will Patel Be The Next Sycophant To Be Fired By Trump?
Donald Trump has fired his head of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Labor Department. Who will be the next to go? Robert Reich thinks it will be Kash Patel. He writes:
You can be Secretary of Defense (War) and cause the mightiest military in the world to be brought to its knees, and still keep your job in the Trump regime.
You can be in charge of public health and cause measles to reemerge as a major hazard to Americans, and still keep your job.
You can be illegally enriching yourself and your family as Commerce Secretary, and still keep your job.
But you’ll be fired for actively and unnecessarily getting bad press.
A few days ago, a senior White House official told Politico that FBI director Kash Patel’s bad press was “not a good look for a cabinet secretary” and had frustrated Trump. “It’s only a matter of time,” they said, before Patel is canned.
Like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Patel has been his own worse press agent.
He filed a $250 million defamation claim against The Atlantic magazine over its April 17 report claiming that his FBI colleagues were alarmed by his excessive drinking and unexplained absences. The report included claims that his security detail struggled to rouse him due to intoxication several times in the past year and that he drank heavily at a private club in Washington. Bureau employees expressed concerns that his behavior posed a threat to public safety.
I doubt it’s Patel’s excessive drinking and absences that are making Trump upset; it’s that they’re being reported, and that Patel has made them even bigger stories by suing The Atlantic over them.
Last week, Patel added to the drinking story when he erupted at NBC’s Ryan Reilly who asked Patel at a press conference whether, as The Atlantic also reported, he feared he had been fired when he was unable to log into his government computer.
“The problem with you and your baseless reporting is that is an absolute lie,” Patel shot back. “It was never said. It never happened. And I will serve in this administration as long as the president and the attorney general want me to do so.” Patel added, “you are off topic,” and “the answer to your question is you are lying.”
Worse yet, from Trump’s viewpoint, is that some of Patel’s drinking has been in the public eye. One video showed him drinking a beer, banging his fist on a table and celebrating with the US men’s hockey team at this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy.
Nothing gets Trump angrier than when one of his underlings is caught doing something stupid on videotape. After the video of Patel spread on social media, Trump called Patel to convey his discontent, Politico reported.
Soon after Patel sued the Atlantic, the New York Times reported that the FBI had been investigating Elizabeth Williamson. Williamson was the New York Times journalist who revealed that Patel had used a swat team to protect his country singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, when she was invited to sing the national anthem at the annual convention of the National Rifle Association. And that Patel had “ripped into” the swat team’s commander when the team left after it became apparent there was no threat to her.
It’s not that Patel misused government funds on his girlfriend. Or that Patel exploded at the FBI swat team’s commander. Or even that Patel ordered an investigation of the journalist who reported this. No, it’s that all of this became a national story — twice.Such self-generated negative press infuriates Trump.
The same day that the Times reported on the FBI’s investigation of Elizabeth Williamson, NBC reported that a federal judge in Texas had tossed out a defamation case brought by Patel against former FBI assistant director-turned-MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi.
Patel had brought the case over Figliuzzi’s remark on “Morning Joe” that Patel had been “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.”
More self-generated negative press: Not that Patel has been doing the nightclub circuit and disregarding his job, but that he invited a story about it by suing Figliuzzi.
Similarly, it’s not that Patel has repeatedly wrongly accused people of federal crimes (announcing someone had been arrested for the murder of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk when the real murderer hadn’t yet turned himself in, and that a person of interest had been detained in the Brown University shooting, only for that individual to be released hours later).
It’s that Patel’s wrong accusations were widely reported, making Patel — and, indirectly, Trump — look dumber than dirt.
Patel simply doesn’t know how to keep a low profile. Like so many others in the Trump regime, he made his name by promoting himself. As a frequent guest on right-wing programs before Trump appointed him FBI director, he pushed conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” the 2020 presidential election, and the January 6 Capitol attack.
But the occupant of the Oval Office doesn’t want his underlings engaging in self-promotion and vindictive lawsuits. If anyone’s going to be self-promotional and vindictive, Trump wants it to be himself.
Patel has been trying to win back Trump’s favor by escalating FBI investigations into Trump enemies. But so far, the investigations haven’t yielded adequate evidence to indict, another mark against him in Trump’s book.
A week ago Sunday, Patel promised that the Justice Department would soon make arrests related to the 2020 election, stating on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that “We’ve got all the information we need, we’re working with our prosecutors at the Department of Justice under [acting] Attorney General Todd Blanche, and we are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you, it’s coming soon.”
Patel’s plea was obviously directed at Trump.
I doubt it will work. Patel will soon be locked out of his computer for good.
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