Wednesday, February 25, 2026
Most Think Trump Will Attack Iran (And Don't Like How He's Handling The Situation)
The charts above are from the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between February 20th and 23rd of a nationwide sample of 1,551 adults (including 1,402 registered voters). The Margin of error is 3.3 points for adults and 3.1 points for registered voters.
In The Last Year Trump's Approval Has Dropped In Every Group (Including GOP)
The chart above is from the CNN / SSRS Poll -- done between February 17th and 20th of a nationwide sample of 2,496 adults, with a 2.5 point margin of error for all adults.
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
Trump Will Claim The State Of The Union Is Strong - Most People Disagree
The chart above reflects the results of the NPR / PBS News / Marist Poll -- done between January 27th and 30th of a nationwide sample of 1,462 adults (including 1,326 registered voters). The margin of error is 2.9 points for adults and 3.0 points for registered voters.
Trump Job Approval Just Gets Worse
The chart above reflects the results of the CNN / SSRS Poll -- done between February 17th and 20th of a nationwide sample of 2,496 adults, with a 2.5 point margin of error.
Boycott Trump's State Of The Union Speech
The following post is by Robert Reich:
I’m not going to watch the State of the Union address Tuesday night. I urge you not to, either.
I hope Nielsen (or whoever makes such estimates these days) will find that far fewer Americans watched Trump’s State of the Union than have watched any other State of the Union in recent memory. It will drive Trump nuts.
There are plenty of other reasons for not watching.
First, he doesn’t deserve our attention. He’s abused and defiled the American presidency, even worse than he did in his first term.
He’s openly taken bribes. He’s blatantly usurped the powers of Congress. He has overtly used the Justice Department to punish people he considers his enemies and pardon people loyal to him. He has willfully rejected the rule of law, broken treaties, literally destroyed part of the White House, thumbed his nose at our allies (including our closest and heretofore loyal neighbors), and utterly failed his constitutional duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. He lies like most people breathe. He’s a fraud and a traitor.
Second, we already know what he’s going to say because he’s already stated and restated his lies every chance he gets. He says the economy is in wonderful shape, that he’s settled six wars, that he’s brought peace to the Middle East, that he’s made America safer and more secure, that the 2020 election was stolen from him, ad nauseam.
He assumes that if he repeats these lies often enough, people will believe them. Why should we give him more of an audience for his lies?
Third, he refuses to be president of the United States but only of the people who voted for him in 2024.
He talks in glowing terms about “my” people while denigrating “them” — those of us who didn’t vote for him, who still disapprove of him, or who refuse to give him whatever he wants.
He won’t even fund so-called blue states. So far this year he’s axed over $1.5 billion in blue-state grants, contrary to the wishes of Congress.
If he doesn’t believe he’s my president, why should I treat him as my president and watch his State of the Union?
Fourth and finally, I already know the real state of the union. It sucks.
The economy has been good for big business and wealthy Americans but shitty for small businesses and average working Americans.
Although Trump repeatedly promised that his tariffs would reduce U.S. imports, shrink the trade deficit, and lead to a revival in American manufacturing, the opposite has happened. The annual trade deficit in goods last year hit a record high. And U.S. manufacturers cut 108,000 jobs.
In the 2024 election, Trump also promised to bring down prices, but inflation is still steaming ahead. Prices grew at an annual rate of 3 percent in December. He’s so out of touch with what most Americans are enduring that he calls the crisis of affordability “fake news.”
He promised to control immigration, but 6 out of 10 Americans think he’s gone “too far” by sending federal agents into American cities who have caused mayhem and murder.
He promised to avoid foreign entanglements, but he abducted the president of Venezuela, killed more than 150 Venezuelans, and is now planning to attack Iran.
His menacing the Middle East has created another inflation risk: The possibility that a key oil export route will be disrupted has caused the price of Brent crude to soar.
For all these reasons, I’m not going to watch Trump’s State of the Union. I recommend that you don’t, either.
Your senators and representatives in Congress should boycott it, too. You might call their offices to suggest this. (Some Democrats are already planning to skip it, opting instead for a counter-programming event on the National Mall dubbed “The People’s State of the Union.” Good!)
And why the hell should justices of the Supreme Court show up, especially after he says he’s “ashamed” of the six who decided his tariffs exceeded his authority — calling the three Democratic appointees a “disgrace to our nation” and the three conservatives who voted against him “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats,” “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” “swayed by foreign interests,” and “an embarrassment to their families”?
Boycott the State of the Union. It’s the least we can do.
Monday, February 23, 2026
Trump Disapproval Of Immigration Grows Wider
The chart above reflects the results of the Washington Post / ABC News / Ipsos Poll -- done between February 12th and 17th of a nationwide sample of 2,589 adults, with a 2.2 point margin of error.
Sunday, February 22, 2026
Canadians No Longer Trust (Or Even Like) The United States
The charts above are from the Politico / Public First Poll -- done between February 6th and 9th of a nationwide sample of 2,000 Canadians, with a 2 point margin of error.
Public Supports Supreme Court Ending Trump Tariffs By A Large Margin
This chart reflects the results of the YouGov Poll -- done on February 20 of a nationwide sample of 1,931 adults (no moe given).
Saturday, February 21, 2026
Supreme Court Rules Most Of Trump Tariffs Are Unconstitutional
The Supreme Court has ruled most of Trump's tariffs as unconstitutional. Here's how NBC News reported it:
The Supreme Court delivered a major blow to President Donald Trump, ruling Friday that he exceeded his authority when imposing sweeping tariffs using a law reserved for a national emergency.
The justices, divided 6-3, held that Trump's aggressive approach to tariffs on products entering the United States from across the world was not permitted under a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
The ruling invalidates many, but not all, of Trump’s tariffs. . . .
Trump's ability to impose tariffs using other laws is not affected by the ruling, and Trump said he plans to use those authorities to impose new duties on a global basis. He said he will soon implement a 10% global tariff, which would be a reduction for nearly all foreign nations. . . .
The ruling was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, who was joined by three liberal justices and two fellow conservatives, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, in the majority. . . .
Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito dissented.
Is The Epstein Scandal Reaching A Critical Mass That Will Cost Trump His Presidency?
The following thought-provoking post is just part of one by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:
The Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down began in June of 1972, but Nixon didn’t resigned until August, 1974. It crossed over his re-election in November, 1972, and was barely a factor, just like Epstein was only a footnote to Trump’s election in 2024. For over two years, most Americans thought Watergate was overblown. . . .
The Nixon administration — and his Department of Justice and its leader, Attorney General John Mitchell — ridiculed both politicians and media folks who expressed concern that Watergate represented an actual threat to our constitutional system of government.
What changed when the tapes were finally released (analogous to the release of 3 million documents by the DOJ and Bondi’s evasive testimony) was that Americans finally realized that the president was, in fact, “a crook” and that the institutions of the federal government — particularly the DOJ — had been covering up for him.
We’re damn close to that moment now.
The recent DOJ release included reference to a report that a 13-15-year old girl reported to the FBI that Donald Trump beat her up when she bit his penis as he forced her to perform oral sex; this week reporter Roger Sollenberger found that she was interviewed at least 4 times by the FBI and those more in-depth interviews (case number 3501.045) have mysteriously gone entirely missing from the documents released by Patel and Bondi.
The story made a headline on the conservative news site Drudge Report, among others; this mirrors the period immediately before Nixon resigned when rightwing sites and elected Republicans stopped publicly defending him.
Nixon fell when institutional America and the GOP stopped speaking out in his defense. It wasn’t just the break-in or the hush money he paid the burglars that broke the dam; it was when the elite consensus turned on him.
Late in the evening on August 7th, 1974, three Republican leaders — Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott, and John Rhodes — walked over to the White House and told President Nixon that the evidence against him had accumulated beyond spin, loyalty, and even partisan defense. The center of gravity had shifted, and two days later he was gone.
I’m not suggesting Trump is losing his presidency this week or next; after all, Watergate took over two years and Nixon didn’t have Fox “News” or 1,500 rightwing radio stations or Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk churning social media on his behalf. Trump has a much more powerful firewall than Nixon ever dreamed of. It may sustain him for months or even another year.
And, as president, he has a lot of tools at his disposal to keep changing the subject, which is where these revelations about Trump could become “world changing” if he comes sufficiently desperate.
A war with Iran appears to be his latest gambit. During Watergate, Nixon’s aides developed what they called a “modified limited hangout,” a strategy not of disproving the scandal but of suffocating it in the media by overwhelming the public with competing announcements, threats, events, and crises.
Nonetheless, while Americans will tolerate misconduct, abuse of office to escape accountability is an entirely different animal. And raping children is a much bigger deal than breaking into the DNC; Nixon didn’t even participate, he just gave the orders and supervised the cover-up. Trump, on the other hand, appears to be right in the middle of Epstein’s operation, perhaps even including his teen modeling agency and Miss Teen USA pageant.
It’s a cliché that “the coverup is worse than the crime,” but they keep doing it.
And now it’s metastasizing beyond Epstein.
Bondi and Patel insisting the Epstein investigation is now closed. Kristi Noem and Kash Patel refusing to give Minnesota police evidence in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. ICE defying over 4,400 court orders and refusing members of Congress or the press entrance to their brutal concentration camps. Trump going after the FBI agents who uncovered Putin’s efforts to make him president in 2016. He and his family making $4 billion off his presidency in less than a year. Trump sucking up to Putin.
Trump’s level of criminality and corruption exceeds Nixon’s by orders of magnitude.
The coverups were why Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell went to prison, as did his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, his Assistant for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman, his Special Counsel Charles Colson, and his White House Counsel John Dean (who’s since been a frequent guest on my radio/TV program).
That has to be waking Pam Bondi and others around Trump up at night. And it should be giving pause to every elected Republican facing the November midterms.
Every Watergate moment looks impossible right up until the hour it becomes inevitable. And when that hour arrives, it never feels sudden to those who carefully read history; only to the people who insisted, until the very end, that it could never happen here.
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