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This is an adapted excerpt from the March 18 episode of "The Rachel Maddow Show."
Some Republican lawmakers supporting President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn rampage against the federal government are facing incredible blowback in their home districts.
In deep-red Idaho on Monday, Republican Sen. Mike Crapo gave a speech at a paid ticketed event in Boise. He was met with hundreds of people, including many military veterans, who stood outside protesting the senator, demanding that he try to stop Trump.
In deep-red West Virginia, large crowds were asked to move their demonstration outside of the Morgantown offices of Republican Rep. Riley Moore.
In middle Georgia, the top story in the local news Monday night was the constituents of Republican Rep. Austin Scott, again including many military veterans, demanding that he meet with them and take a stand against what Trump is doing. They convened in the parking lot outside Scott’s district office.
In Colorado Springs, an image of Republican Rep. Jeff Crank was made into a cardboard cutout and propped up as hundreds of his constituents protested his not standing up to Trump and refusing to meet with them about it.
“I cannot recall a moment in history when American public opinion and voters’ views of a president ... have been more in conflict with each other,” Horwitt said.
In Greensboro, North Carolina, nearly 1,000 people turned up for a town hall with Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, at which the senator was represented by an empty chair — almost 1,000 people mocking Tillis for refusing to meet with them and for being too chicken to stand up to Trump. The event even began with an appearance from the Raging Grannies, a singing activist group, who performed a song called “Oh, Tillis, Please Just Do Your Job,” to the tune of “Oh, When the Saints Go Marching In.”
But for all the different ways that Trump and Musk — his top campaign donor and now one of his top advisers — are terrifying and turning off their own voters, there’s one element of what the president is doing that is so radically out of step with the American people that I don’t think it’s sustainable in normal democratic terms.
According to a new NBC News poll, 61% of Americans say they sympathize more with Ukraine, while only 2% say they sympathize with Russia. When those same Americans were asked where they believe Trump’s sympathies lie, 49% said Russia and just 8% said Ukraine. Overall, Trump is underwater 13 points on his handling of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
When asked about their view on Russia generally, the proportion of Americans who view the country positively is 6%. The proportion of those who view Russia negatively, according to the poll, is 68%. Only 3% of Americans have a positive view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, while 84% have a negative view.
Those are the views of the American people. Keep that in mind when you consider Trump’s phone call with Putin this week. Amid all the other chaos Trump has been wreaking on our government — the administration’s crackdown on Social Security, which an internal memo says could force up to 85,000 retired and disabled Americans to physically go in person to Social Security offices every week; the disaster scene at Food and Drug Administration headquarters, where they told 10,000 people to show up at an office that has 6,000 parking places and no chairs and limited office supplies; and the news that the administration fired hundreds of operators and engineers servicing hydroelectric dams in 17 states — amid all of that chaos, the president chose to spend over two hours Tuesday on the phone with Putin. A man who, again, has a 3% approval rating with the American people.
After the president got off the phone, NBC News reported the Trump administration is considering undertaking a significant restructuring of the U.S. military’s combatant commands. That plan would include the U.S. giving up the role of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, according to two defense officials familiar with the planning and a Pentagon briefing reviewed by NBC News.
This isn’t something Trump campaigned on. In fact, the president is doing a lot of things he never campaigned on. He’s talking about invading Mexico, taking over Canada, going to war with Denmark — which means NATO — in order to take Greenland. He wants to seize Gaza. He wants to invade Panama.
He didn’t talk about this at rallies; he didn’t publish tweets about it; he didn’t air ads about it; he didn’t campaign on it. It’s just what he’s apparently planning on doing now that he’s in office — while he talks frequently, and at length, with his friend Putin.
When that NBC News poll came out this week, pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, who conducted the survey along with GOP pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, talked about those Putin and Russia numbers, noting how far apart the American people are from their president on this one, honestly bizarre issue.
“I cannot recall a moment in history when American public opinion and voters’ views of a president, as to which country they are more aligned with, have been more in conflict with each other,” he said.
The American people are against Putin. The American president is very much for him. This, amid everything else, is a test for us — because that should be unsustainable in a democracy.