Trump's poll numbers are awful — but they contain a terrible warning for Dems

Donald Trump’s floor is his ceiling. And his ceiling is his floor.

That is the stark takeaway from a new Associated Press-NORC poll showing his approval rating stuck at roughly 40 percent — flatlining across every major issue. Only 37 percent approve of his handling of the economy. Just 38 percent on immigration. On foreign policy, it drops to 33 percent.

Yet despite the constant turbulence, that 40 percent Trump overall approval rate among Americans doesn’t budge more than a point or two, if that. It’s frozen.

Trump knows this. Even amid rapidly deteriorating faculties, the president is well aware that the people he hates — and has said so — dramatically outnumber the ones who love him. Or at least who are willing to follow him to the ends of the democracy.

Just as Trump knew he lost in November 2020 — with his response coming on January — he knows his party will lose one or both houses of Congress in the midterm elections if he can’t corrupt those outcomes. Or, as I suggested, prevent them from happening.

That’s why Trump’s words last Wednesday in a Reuters interview were not idle chatter.

“It's some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don't win the midterms,” Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.”

His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, later claimed he was joking. When a reporter asked whether the president finds the idea of canceling elections funny, Leavitt sneered, “Only someone like you would take that so seriously.”

Can you hear the echo?

• “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
• “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
• “Stand back and stand by.”
• “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”

Each time, Trump apologists insisted he had been joking. Or that he shouldn’t be taken literally. Each time, neither was the case: Trump had merely floated the same type of trial balloon he’s been inflating throughout his career.

Trump has been repeatedly expressed admiration for dictators who rule without elections. Remember when he publicly fawned over President Xi Jinping in 2018 at Mar-a-Lago after China’s Communist Party effectively made him president for life?

More recently he “joked” to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky using the crude insult that Zelensky was staying at war to avoid having to face elections. That was not idle chatter.

Trump knows that substance and issues — and even results — do not matter to his political survival. His base is locked in. Independents have tuned out. Democrats are in a state of permanent alarm. He governs with minority support and knows the math is frozen.

So what do you do when you can’t persuade voters? You start questioning whether voters should matter. Confronted by Reuters with the fact that 83 percent of Americans oppose his horrific designs on illegally seizing Greenland, Trump went to his safe word like he always does with bad facts.

He called it “fake.”

In the same brief interview Trump twice said “I don’t care” when asked about Senate Republicans pushing back on persecuting Fed Chair Jerome Powell. He doesn’t.

Trump doesn’t need Congressional approval any more than he needs voter approval. He craves one thing, and he craves it dearly.

He needs power.

Building coalitions is hardly Trump’s road to power because of that frozen support. The normal tools of democratic politics — persuasion, compromise, consensus — are useless.

When many of us preoccupy ourselves with the psychological breadcrumbs of Trump’s thirst for power, we often overlook the simple math of authoritarianism. Trump has no other political survival mechanism.

So, while Democrats are workshopping messages about grocery prices for the 2026 midterms, Republicans ruled by Trump will continue to degrade the value and integrity of elections.

Don’t be surprised when the man with the frozen math seriously tries to prevent them from happening at all.

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