Given his incessant insecurities, it perhaps comes as no surprise that Donald Trump cannot (and, as time has proven, will not) stop talking about his “ratings.”
But, clearly, the few fonts of wisdom that exist within the walls of the Trump White House have gotten to him over the past handful of weeks. Despite his commanding the airwaves for hours per day with his COVID-19 “briefings,” poll after poll showed that voters across the nation, be they in red states or blue states, were far more likely to approve of the governmental responses to COVID offered by their governors than the response offered by the Trump administration. So, notably, we’ve seen his self-congratulatory tweets largely go from poll numbers to TV ratings.
But we’ve seen another marked strategic shift. Over the past few weeks, Trump started very pointedly attacking governors who have been aggressive in utilizing measures such as “shelter-in-place” orders to try to contain the spread of the coronavirus. While it had occasionally popped up in his briefings, it reached its apex on April 17 with a series of utterly bizarre tweets that called for three Democratic-controlled states to be “liberated,” a move that one think tank specializing in domestic terrorism fears could act as a dog whistle for right-wing attacks. Continue reading.