Trump’s polls? Low, and not getting better

I saw on one of the news programs the other day that Trump tweeted that his overall approval rate was 53%. The news program showed the tweet onscreen: “93% Approval Rating in the Republican Party, 53% overall.” I had to rub my eyes on that one. Really? Where? When? What poll? It didn’t conform to anything I’d heard. So I tried to find out what Trump was tweeting about. I checked both of his Twitter feeds and found the one with the “93% Republican Approval” part. But the “53%” part was gone. Evidently it was a just another Trump lie, and when he got caught with his chubby little hand in the cookie jar, he had to delete the fake “news.”

In fact, his ratings are no better than they’ve ever been. As of yesterday, his Disapproval stands at 53.7% while his Approval is a low 41.4%.

That’s FiveThirtyEight’s generalized average of five recent polls. Trump’s best was at Rasmussen, which consistently ranks him higher than any other poll, and must therefore be viewed with suspicion; founder Scott Rasmussen worked for George W. Bush. But even that Republican-leaning Rasmussen puts his favorability at a less-than-stellar 47%. The more credible YouGov poll put him, as of last Friday, at a lousy 39%. So Trump is stuck exactly where he’s always been. People don’t like the guy, and nothing is going to make them change their minds.

There is, obviously, one group that adores him (besides the neo-nazis at Breitbart who celebrated the New Zealand massacre), and that’s Christians. The evangelicals in particular are head-over-heels in love with the serial adulterer. But then, evangelicals are among the dumbest religious groups in America.

Oops! Did I just say something politically incorrect? I guess I did.

The smartest religious groups are Unitarians and Jews, closely followed by Anglicans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Buddhists. The least educated? Church of God, Baptists, Assemblies of God and Church of Christ—all the usual suspects. These people are dumb as fenceposts. They never went to college, no doubt because they believe that secular institutions of higher learning are hell beds of queers, Commies, atheists and terrorists.

Little Timmy: Mom and Dad, I really want to go to State College and study music and math.

Parents: Over our dead bodies! I didn’t bring my child into this world to get perverted by the socialist elite! You goin’ to Bible College, boy, that’s all the book-learnin’ y’all need!

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This isn’t to say that evangelicals haven’t had some form of teaching. They have—in religious institutions, or from home schooling. Unfortunately, in those cases, the people teaching the kids are just passing on their own dumbness and bigotry. You can go to school for a thousand years but if your teachers are nutbags who think Adam and Eve and little Cain and Abel played with dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden 5,800 years ago, you’re just going to inherit shit-for-brains. It’s those ignoramuses who give Trump his 93% approval rating among Republicans.

What a party of nothing! Hello, Vice President Pence.

Well, some people accuse me of hating on evangelicals. But look at it from my point of view. I believe in secular education, in intelligence, in facts, in the America created by our Founders, who were literate and well-educated and wanted future generations to be. So I’m inclined to disfavor evangelicals strictly from the point of view of them destroying intelligence and declaring war on facts. Then, too, their rapid, vicious, incredibly stupid homophobia obviously is deeply offensive to me. One of these days I’m going to spend a couple hours on Google looking up all the evangelical preachers who got busted in horrible sex scandals. Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker and that awful perv, Ted Haggard, immediately come to mind. I swear, you could have every evangelical preacher in America caught in a dingy alleyway having orgies with drag queens and dogs (we’d read about it in the National Enquirer), and their faithful flocks would stand by them, the same way the faithful Trump flocks stand by their lying, sexually depraved fuhrer.

My readers know that I’m an amateur historian of World War II and especially of the rise of the Nazis. The leading Nazis—Hitler, Goering—made much of “loyalty.” They demanded and expected unflinching loyalty from their followers; that accounted for the “I was only following orders” excuses from the Nazis who hunted down Jews and killed them.

Well, there’s a lot to be said for loyalty, but to a madman? That’s when you’ve got to do some serious soul-searching and decide if there’s a higher value than “loyalty.” Namely, to decency, truth, civilization and law. But real soul-searching requires a form of intelligence that evangelicals simply don’t have.