The kids are alright

Some good news amidst this end-of-summertime insanity: The dwindling group of people gullible enough—or simply stubborn enough—to keep believing Donald Trump’s preposterous and relentless lies is dwindling even further. According to the most recent nonpartisan polls with the largest sampling audience, only 36 percent of Americans say they approve of the job he’s doing—a five-point drop from the previous month, and his lowest rating ever. Even Republicans, ever-ready to support the leader of the party come hell, high water, or a never-ending stream of felony pleas and criminal indictments from the people who surrounded candidate Trump and got him elected and served under him in the White House, are now jumping ship in anticipation of—you guessed it—more guilty pleas and more indictments. (Even the number of people who call themselves Republicans is plunging—by more than 15 million people. That’s a full 20 percent of the party.) And as Trump’s idiotic trade wars wreak havoc on farmers and many others in middle America, his support among “rural dwellers” has plunged from 60 percent to 45 percent. (Kevin “What, Me Worry?” Cramer, though, who’s ingratiated himself with Trump so thoroughly that he likely has to ask Dear Leader for permission to use the restroom, says, uh, not to worry: The trade wars, he says, are going just wonderfully.)

Does any of this come as a surprise to you? That depends on where you get your news from. Facebook? It’s been proven about 19,000 different ways that what you see on Facebook is, more or less, what you want to see: The algorithm that picks whose posts you see is purposely constructed to function more or less as an echo chamber. Twitter? Given that even Twitter acknowledges that there are literally millions of fake posts being pushed every day from all manner of snake-oil salesmen and “troll farms” pushed by Russian military intelligence, it takes some clever sleuthing to determine what—and who—is real, and whether they’re spouting actual information or merely trying out provocative opinions. Most newspapers and television news outlets at least come with professional standards and, at the end of the day, have someone to answer to—though there are, of course, exceptions.

Let’s consider Trump’s cheerleaders over at Fox News—and let’s start with that “News” business. While people like Sean Hannity love to dress their shows up with a sort of booming bluster trying to pass itself off as gravitas and authority, it’s worth noting that whenever he’s criticized, the first thing he says in his own defense is that he’s not a journalist but, rather, a talk-show host or an entertainer. The problem Fox News faces, though, has less to do with who’s believing it and more to do with who’s watching it, which the cable network tries very hard to avoid discussing: The majority of its viewers are 68 or older.

What do younger people think? (And “younger,” for these purposes, means the ages between 15 and 34, whose views were polled recently.) Far more than half of them find Trump to be “racist,” “dishonest,” and “mentally unfit to be President.”

There’s one more group worth bringing up that has some rather strong words for Trump: The people he hand-picked to be his closest advisors. According to a new book out from Bob Woodward—a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner who has commanded universal respect from both parties in Washington for decades—Trump’s own chief of staff, John Kelly, describes his boss as an “idiot.” Defense Secretary James Mattis says Trump has the understanding of “a fifth or sixth grader.” (Sorry, fifth and sixth graders! Those were good years for me!) His own personal lawyer describes him as “a bleeping idiot” [though he used a different word instead of “bleeping”—one that would probably get you sent home from fifth or sixth grade], and told him that if he talked with Robert Mueller he’d end up in an “orange jump suit.”

So, uh, all you young people out there reading this: Can you please talk with your parents?

Corey Seymour is a proud NRHS graduate who went on to study political science, economics, and literature at UND and Georgetown University. A former writer and editor on the National Affairs Desk at Rolling Stone and at many other magazines, he now works as a senior editor at Vogue in New York. Write me at [email protected].