Back to where he has been at his worst. Can he go lower? I doubt it. He's got too many cultists behind him who would believe him no matter what.
Trump's cult is no bigger than any other President. It's no surprise that his approval is as "high" as it is when the economy is doing pretty good. Most people don't obsessively follow every news story and care that Pruitt did some stuff or Trump said some mean thing. They tend to look at the overall story. And for most people... they are about as good or slightly better off than they were in 2016, with a marginally bigger pocketbook thanks to rising wages + tax cuts.
You'll see how small his cult really is if things actually start going south for people. His approvals may go down to about 25-29... which is exactly around Bush's levels.
Nope. His strong approvals are no higher than Bush's, Obamas, or anyone elses.
You say that Trump is so obviously bad... but most Americans have been doing better in the past 2 years than they were before 2016. It's easy to see why GOP partisans are mostly sticking with the President when their pockets are fatter and the economy is improving. Many don't like some specific Trump action.... but the USA is doing better than it was before 2016. Most people who approve of Trump now would approve of Bush, or would approve of Romney, etc.
The damage of bad leadership takes several years to manifest itself in failed wars and in corrupt booms that go bust. The second Gulf War seemed to go well enough for a while. The corrupt boom in real estate speculation under Dubya took six years before it imploded. Do you remember the big hustle of Dubya's "Ownership Society"? People were enticed to buy houses that they could never afford with loans with negative amortization and balloon payments down the line that the borrowers would never be able to pay. Unable to pay the huge down payment two years later, they would default on a house rising in value... and the lender would get a profit from selling a house of increased valuation to another customer. That was more profitable than waiting for regular payments to come in from someone who successfully pays off a mortgage. In the end there is nobody able to buy the property, and the lender gets stuck with a foreclosed property no longer marketable. When that happens often enough, the real estate bubble collapses.
The hustle with Donald Trump is rising rents. Eventually people end up spending everything on rent and having to scavenge in garbage cans. That too goes bust.
Rural areas will get hit hardest and earliest with high input prices (especially energy) and low commodity prices. I see that happening already. Farmers and ranchers, usually a conservative segment of the political order, will be the first to feel the hit from the consequences of the President's trade war. If the causes were not quite the same, Rural America went from reliably conservative to being in strong support of the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt.
Let us also remember that well-educated people might have sympathy for people of limited learning, but they also have unwavering contempt for people of pompous ignorance such as that of Sarah Palin or Donald Trump. Note the thread on the Republican Party treating ignorance and superstition as virtues. Note well that well-educated people voted for Barack Obama, and that the Democratic nominee for President in 2020 will be the one most capable of attaching to the legacy of Barack Obama. Such a leader will fault Republicans and well-heeled special interests for the failure to enact the Obama agenda in full.
Bill Clinton had a sane foreign policy. His economic policy (of course you can give Republican majorities at the time some credit) led to budget surpluses. The Whitewater scandal went nowhere. Most people excoriated his sexual dalliances.
Today we see careers ruined in the media and politics (probably academia and commerce as well) for sexual misconduct. Think of Al Franken, whom Democrats supported and gave up on. His sex scandals are far less severe than those of Donald Trump.
Most people see the current boom resulting from Obama -- not Trump. We have a nearly-nine-year boom in stock-market valuations. That is unusually, freakishly long. President Trump excoriates his predecessor at every turn.
Donald Trump causes me to question whether being an American is so great anymore. I have questions about his fundamental decencies, including respect for the rule of law. He governs in a way that one can interpret as either despotic or dictatorial, depending on interpretation; either one is contemptible. He insists upon winning no matter what cost others pay -- and I question more whether he will allow us the free election that we have come to recognize as a norm. His vituperative attacks on opponents and backsliders suggest a tyrant or his propagandists or hanging judges.
The best thing that I can say of the American political system is that it is not easy for him to transform into a vehicle of despotic rule. Maybe his sordid personality will fail at his objective of America as a reflection of his vile self.
This, to me, is the post of the year along with pbrower2a's post on right wing 'religions.'
There are other things that Trump has done that will ultimately damage the economy:
1.His environmental deregulation that will result in degrading natural resource inputs.
2.His tax cuts that have ballooned the deficit and already resulted in considerably higher long term interest rates.
3.His attempts to arbitrarily impose penalties on businesses led by people who oppose him (Amazon) or to favor businesses led by people who support him (the coal and nuclear energy companies.) Trump's violation of the Emoluments Clause also fit in with this.
If Trump gets his way on significantly reducing immigration, that would complete his nativist right wing economically damaging agenda.
The only other thing Trump could do to damage the economy short of taking over companies and putting incompetents to manage them (Venezuela) or through imposing autarky (Franco's Spain) would be if he got rid of the Federal Reserve and put the United States back on the Gold Standard. Fortunately, Trump is so ignorant, he likely knows nothing about that goofiness.
