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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Trump's cognitive state should be a bigger story [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-05-03

Stephen Robinson/Public notice:

Trump's brain is gone It really should be a bigger story. Donald Trump’s recent interviews with Time and The Atlantic revealed a president who is completely unhinged and incoherent. Sadly, that’s not news. But what stood out is that Trump is consistently confused and disconnected from reality even on issues that are supposedly in his wheelhouse. Trump has always been an ignoramus who masks his intellectual shortcomings with bombast and declarations of his own brilliance, but his rambling nonsensical responses in these latest interviews should set off alarms — especially in light of all the media attention and scrutiny Joe Biden received after his disastrous debate performance or when Special Counsel Robert Hur described him as “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

Heather Long/Washington Post:

Why is the economy shrinking? Eduardo Porter: The underlying economic performance was pretty stable: consumer spending plus gross private fixed investment increased 3 percent in the first quarter, up from 2.9 percent in the previous quarter. This report is perhaps the last picture of an economy before getting walloped by Trump’s barrage of unorthodox policymaking. Natasha Sarin Yeah, it’s what I call the “Before Times” print. The economy was pretty strong!

Those empty shelves are coming this month.

x When asked who is most responsible for fraud, waste, and abuse in government health programs, about half of Democrats (49%) say private health insurers are most responsible, while Republicans most often name government workers (42%).



🔗: https://t.co/c03FNAM5OX — KFF (@KFF) May 2, 2025

Philip Bump/Washington Post:

America gave Trump another chance. He’s blowing it. For a brief moment after the election, Trump’s favorability numbers went up. So much for that. As is common at the start of a presidential term in office, the 100-day mark has yielded a smorgasbord of new polling assessing views of the president’s performance. And as is common for Trump, he has eagerly and loudly declared that those polls, probably intentionally, fail to capture his staggering popularity. ... Obviously this is nonsense, as made most obvious in his suggestion that a poll in April 2025 is somehow interfering with a nonexistent election in which the person named DONALD J. TRUMP is a candidate. It’s Trump, more firmly ensconced in his bubble of sycophancy than ever before, expressing his frustration at the fact that the bubble has an outer boundary. What the spate of recent polls shows is that any post-election honeymoon Trump enjoyed is gone, dried up and shattered and swept into the wind. With it went the central narrative of his 2024 election: that it was a massive, unprecedented political and cultural victory rather than a narrow, plurality win relying heavily on inflation concerns.

Paul Blumenthal/HuffPost:

Trump’s First 100 Days: Destroying America Was The Plan All Along Trump wants to be the anti-FDR — and his goal is to smash the country built during the 20th century. In his first 100 days, President Donald Trump has taken a bludgeon to the government, civil society, civil rights laws, efforts at desegregation, foreign alliances, anti-corruption law and norms, the entire global economy, and the country’s very self-conception as born from the idea that “all men are created equal.” But for all the questioning of whether Trump knows what he is doing, this is not an accident, or a byproduct of other goals: Destroying America as we know it was always the point of the second Trump administration. That country was born in the 20th century, and Trump’s second term agenda, led by a group of the ideologues and oligarchs who backed his reelection, aims to repeal the 20th century.

x 2025 APRIL PARTY ID - In political terms, do you consider yourself to be a Republican or a Democrat (with indie leaners)



🔵 Democrat: 45%

🔴 Republican: 44%



Was R+5 in March vs D+1 now

——

@NapolitanNews/RMG Research | 9,212 RVhttps://t.co/ORowl3OrhZ https://t.co/vmtlkHJSSf pic.twitter.com/tSZ5q15VFe — InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) May 2, 2025

New York Times:

Trump’s Cuts to Science Funding Could Hurt U.S. Economy, Study Shows Reducing federal support for research and development could cause long-run economic damage and reduce government revenue. Cutting federal funding for scientific research could cause long-run economic damage equivalent to a major recession, according to a new study from researchers at American University. In recent months, the Trump administration has sought to cancel or freeze billions of dollars in grants to scientists at Columbia, Harvard and other universities, and has moved to sharply curtail funding for academic medical centers and other institutions. Deeper cuts could be on the way. As soon as this week, the White House is expected to propose sharp reductions in discretionary spending, including on research and development, as part of the annual budget process. Economists have warned that such cuts could undermine American competitiveness in areas like vaccine development, artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and could slow growth in income and productivity in the long term. The private sector can’t fully replace government dollars, they argue, because basic research is too risky and takes too long to pay off to attract sufficient private investment.

G Elliott Morris/Strength in Numbers:

How low can Trump’s approval rating go? Historically, net approval declines by about 20 points from the 100-day mark to the midterms These are trends (change in ratings), not absolute approval There are two immediate takeaways from these charts. First: Hey, what happened 240 days into George W. Bush's presidency? Oh, okay, we'll have to exclude that line from the model I run in a second... But the increase in Bush's approval after 9/11 is very striking to see on that chart. Question for the SIN community: Is the rally around the flag after 9/11 the largest and quickest increase in president or prime minister approval ratings in history, regardless of country? And second, we see that presidents generally lose support over the first two years of their term, for the most part regardless of what they do. The explanation for this from political science is that every action a president takes ends up marginalizing someone, and as they shift policy in their ideological direction away from the median voter, presidents marginalize increasing shares of the public. Some presidents do lose a lot more support, however: Gerald Ford, for example, loses the most (net) support for a president ever after he pardons Richard Nixon for his role in Watergate and the subsequent cover-up. Jimmy Carter almost passed Ford up for a hot second in 1978, but recovered ground after the Camp David Accords.

David Schuster and Cliff Schecter mock Trump’s MS-13 insistence:

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