Patterico's Pontifications

7/15/2020

Majority Polled Say Trump Is Hurting Efforts to Slow Virus

Filed under: General — Dana @ 5:32 pm



[guest post by Dana]

The new Quinnipiac Poll doesn’t deliver good news for the president because that pesky virus just won’t give him a break:

62% of registered voters say President Trump is hurting efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus, compared to 31% who say he’s helping, according to a Quinnipiac University poll out Wednesday.

The big picture: 36% of Americans approve of Trump’s overall job performance, and 60% disapprove — his worst net approval rating since August 2017 and a 6-point drop from June. The poll has Joe Biden with a 15% advantage nationally over Trump, widening his lead from last month by 7 points.

Between the lines: On his handling of the economy, Trump’s approval rating dropped to 36% in July as states force more businesses to close again due to the nationwide surge in coronavirus cases.

“Trump’s strongest card, the economy, shredded by a killer virus, may have left the president with no go-to issue or trait to stave off defeat,” said Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy.

Here are some breakdowns:

61% disapprove of the way Trump has handled reopening schools.

67% say they do not trust the information Trump is providing about the coronavirus.

65% say they trust the information provided by Anthony Fauci, whom White House officials have sought to discredit in recent days.

Meanwhile, Fauci has pushed back against White House trade adviser Peter Navarro’s op-ed, in which Navarro claims that Fauci “has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on”:

Fauci called White House attacks on him “bizarre” and said they ultimately damaged Trump.

“I cannot figure out in my wildest dreams why they would want to do that,” he said. “I think they realize now that that was not a prudent thing to do, because it’s only reflecting negatively on them.”

“I can’t explain Peter Navarro,” he said. “He’s in a world by himself.”

Meanwhile, the White House has distanced themselves from Navarro, claiming that he went “rogue” with the op-ed, and circumvented the usual channels of approval:

“The Peter Navarro op-ed didn’t go through normal White House clearance processes and is the opinion of Peter alone. @realDonaldTrump values the expertise of the medical professionals advising his Administration,” White House director of strategic communications Alyssa Farah tweeted.

President Trump entered the fray when asked about the op-ed, saying that:

He [Navarro] made a statement representing himself. He shouldn’t be doing that. I have a very good relationship with Anthony. We’re all on the same team.

However, Trump stopped short of refuting Navarro’s claims about Fauci.

–Dana

58 Responses to “Majority Polled Say Trump Is Hurting Efforts to Slow Virus”

  1. Hello.

    Dana (25e0dc)

  2. The story here is that one out of three still ever believes Trump, much less says he’s doing a good job.

    As Orin Kerr put it:

    Historians will struggle to understand how by mid-2020 so many millions of Americans still thought Trump was perfectly fine.

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  3. Houston Chronicle posted an obit that’s 43 pages long today.

    Houstonians also are seeing Biden for Prez ads on TV now. And Biden’s comfortably ahead in Texas. Even if you think the polls are garbage, he’s definitely in the running in Texas.

    It’s a terrible year for the GOP and if a Republican is sincerely concerned about what that means, about what a Biden administration means, about court nominations, they must demand a different nominee. I’m not saying that will stop Biden. But it will save a lot of downticket races if the whole reason Bernie bros are showing up is suddenly gone.

    Dustin (d0158a)

  4. “Poll” suggests there is a ‘secret Trump vote’ – the ‘Silent Majority.’

    It’s out there. May even be your next door neighbor. An anecdotal case-in-point; driving to the PO at lunch time in Southern California– a family had set up a TRUMP hat, flag and T-shirt stand with a yuuuuuge red Trump banner at the roadside in a parking lot. Thought they were crazy. Within less than half an hour- my time in line at the PO- the stand was crowded w/patrons and more surprisingly, the 18-wheelers; the truckers, were honking approvingly as they drove by: “Eastbound and down; loaded up and Trumpin’…”

    It was surprising to see. So don’t kid yourselves or whistle past the graveyard: it is a mistake to underestimate the depth and breadth of support for The Donald.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  5. 2. I can think that Trump is doing a terrible job, and still believe that he’s not responsible for the fast spread of a virus so deadly, you probably won’t even know you have it if you don’t get tested.

    Gryph (08c844)

  6. a virus so deadly, you probably won’t even know you have it if you don’t get tested

    There’s 138,000 who don’t know now that they had it, and never will no matter how many times you test them.

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  7. Gryph, here’s an income opportunity you may want to get in on.

    You’re welcome.

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  8. There’s 138,000 who don’t know now that they had it, and never will no matter how many times you test them.

    Those 138,000 heroically sacrificed themselves so that you could use them as a political prop.

    beer ‘n pretzels (8dac67)

  9. May even be your next door neighbor.

    I actually get along really well with my neighbors because I save my contrarian BS for this blog (you’re welcome). They are uniformly for Biden. Not a one of them like Biden. He would be easy to beat.

    it is a mistake to underestimate the depth and breadth of support for The Donald.

    He has failed at everything he’s ever done. He can’t even wear hair. He can barely walk. A cup of water eludes his enfeebled mind. He shouts nonsense about eating bleach and being THE LONE RANGER. He is an idiot.

    Granted, Trump’s the kind of dictator to have 100% popular vote wins. But he’s not a dictator. He’s just a loser. He’s never won a popularity contest in his life, even against Hillary. He can’t even keep his prostitutes happy, and he pays them more than his lawyers (and they earn every penny).

    It is a mistake to overestimate Trump and unfortunately the GOP made that mistake. Look at the ruin he has left in so many lives. The GOP is going to fight a war Trump has already lost. He will walk away a worldwide disgrace, bitter, cussing us, perhaps killing people in his lame duck era before someone shuts him down quietly.

    You know everyone on his cabinet has trouble sleeping, imagining how the 25th amendment could play out and save us. Every one of them.

    Dustin (d0158a)

  10. Those 138,000 heroically sacrificed themselves so that you could use them as a political prop.

    They didn’t sacrifice themselves. Some were unavoidable casualties of a pandemic. Many more were preventable casualties of, in the best case, incompetence, and in the worst, culpable dereliction of duty. Three were friends. I mourn their loss and take them as seriously as, well, a pandemic. I wish I saw evidence that Trump and his cult of Renfields take them nearly so seriously.

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  11. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t, but the media seems to have that as a narrative.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  12. Lurker, I’m sorry you lost three friends. The year has hit us all, even the ones who don’t like to see it.

    Dustin (d0158a)

  13. Thanks, Dustin.

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  14. the china flu is so deadly you don’t know you have it
    until your tested

    mg (8cbc69)

  15. 9. Political prop, eh? What’s my agenda? Where are my ulterior motives? You can agree or disagree with me, but I think I’ve been pretty straightforward in my beliefs here.

    Sounds to me like if these casualties “heroically sacrificed themselves” to a disease, I’m not the only one using them as a political prop (assuming that I even am).

    7. Right. Because people never die of anything else, and if it weren’t for this pandemic which Trump started, we’d all be immortal and live forever./ SMDH

    Gryph (08c844)

  16. 16

    Political prop, eh? What’s my agenda? Where are my ulterior motives?

    Read it again. It was directed at me, not you.

    Right. Because people never die of anything else, and if it weren’t for this pandemic which Trump started, we’d all be immortal and live forever./ SMDH

    Don’t light any matches near all that straw. Also, if your only reaction to the untimely death of 138,000 of your fellow citizens is to hand wave indifferently about how we all die of something, consider at least pretending to care. It’s a less ghoulish look.

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  17. 17. 7000-8000 people die of all non-covid deaths daily. This does concern me insofar as I hope someday we can lessen that number without completely torching our economy out of irrational fear. But I’m not going to mourn 138,000 anonymous people because the media and a bunch of blog commenters tell me I should.

    Besides, that number is highly suspect.

    Gryph (08c844)

  18. 18.

    But I’m not going to mourn 138,000 anonymous people because the media and a bunch of blog commenters tell me I should.

    Heaven forfend. You do you.
    Also, JAMA study shows COVID deaths are under-reported.

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  19. where certain contagions are given free reign

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/07/coronavirus-in-one-state-72.php

    narciso (7404b5)

  20. where certain contagions are given free reign

    … and terror is the Order of the Day…

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  21. 19. So? What if the JAMA study is wrong? Or has an agenda? 300 labs in Florida alone had 100% positive rates because they didn’t report any negatives. You won’t find that in any JAMA study.

    Gryph (08c844)

  22. Boo

    mg (90cdd5)

  23. how can data be this skewed five six months in, berenson is my guide to reconciling the numbers, not any partisan, of course some on this board are on team cuomo since the beginning, they must really hate their elders,

    narciso (7404b5)

  24. Gryph,

    You want to be indifferent to 138,000 Americans dying? That’s up to you. You want to spin evidence-free conspiracy theories about JAMA having an agenda? Again, suit yourself. You can believe my wife is ugly and my dad assassinated JFK for all I care.

    I just have one question. If all those people dying is no big deal, why do you want there to be fewer of them?

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  25. If all those people dying is no big deal, why do you want there to be fewer of them?

    Those deaths are a big deal, and so are the hundreds of thousands dead of Covid outside the US which you don’t think are a big deal because you can’t pin them on Trump. They have no political value to you.

    beer ‘n pretzels (7b79e1)

  26. USA Today just annotated Navarro’s hit piece on Fauci.

    However, several of Navarro’s criticisms of Fauci — on the China travel restrictions, the risk from the coronavirus and falling mortality rates — were misleading or lacked context. As such, Navarro’s op-ed did not meet USA TODAY’s fact-checking standards.

    It’s vaguely reminiscent of the Tom Cotton op-ed at the NYT, but without all the behind-the-scenes intolerant illiberal drama from all woke scolding karens in the newsroom.

    Paul Montagu (5ffc5f)

  27. As such, Navarro’s op-ed did not meet USA TODAY’s fact-checking standards.

    Dp they fact check other Op-Ed pieces?

    Like anything that says anything about incidents of African Americans killed by police?

    Maybe they do.

    Sammy Finkelman (b4888e)

  28. The article published in JAMA tells you nothing new. It is trivial and obviously correct. It could have been a high school or college term paper.

    From March 1 to April 25, there were 87,001 excess deaths (deaths above the expected number, based on averages from the past five years), but only 65% of those deaths were attributed to COVID-19, according to “Excess Deaths from COVID-19 and Other Causes, March-April 2020.” And in 14 states, including California and Texas, more than 50% of excess deaths were tied to underlying causes not related to coronavirus.

    Sammy Finkelman (b4888e)

  29. 27.

    If you have a reason apart from your awesome mind reading skills for believing I don’t care about foreign COVID victims, please do share. I would hate to think you just pulled a scurrilous accusation like that out of your butt.

    Now the recursiveness of thinking about a butt-gerbil’s butt is making my head hurt. Thanks, Obama.

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  30. The number of deaths that can properly be attributed to Covid may actually be greater than the number of excess deaths. We had fewer deaths due to automobile accidents, work accidents, non-emergency operations, etc.

    Sammy Finkelman (b4888e)

  31. If you have a reason apart from your awesome mind reading skills for believing I don’t care about foreign COVID victims, please do share.

    Aside from the fact — midst all your sanctimonious haranguing of another commenter about “pretending to care” and a “ghoulish look” — you never mention them?

    beer ‘n pretzels (3bd502)

  32. You haven’t mentioned your family. You obviously don’t care about them.

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  33. I see. Ridiculously strained analogies are the lengths you will go to avoid mentioning the many hundreds of thousands dead outside the US.

    beer ‘n pretzels (fbad48)

  34. Why do you refuse to mention your family?

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  35. LOL. If I had hundreds of thousands of deaths in my family, I would certainly bring it up on a blog like this, lurker.

    beer ‘n pretzels (fbad48)

  36. So you don’t care enough about your family to mention them unless hundreds of thousands of them die?

    Are you familiar with the aphorism, “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence?”

    Pull your head out of Trump’s butt long enough to oxygenate your brain; then think about it.

    Then grow up.

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  37. read the stats, not the press release,

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1283765309208485891.html

    narciso (7404b5)

  38. read the stats, not the press release,

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1283765309208485891.html

    narciso (7404b5)

  39. I’m thinking about how grown up your personal attack is, lurker.

    beer ‘n pretzels (aee173)

  40. bnp,

    Kidding aside, and the aphorism notwithstanding, I obviously don’t think the absence of evidence that you care about your family means there is evidence you don’t care about them. And you know full well the same goes for my feelings about foreign COVID deaths. So seriously, how about you just grow up?

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  41. LOL. You mean my personal attack on your evidence-free smear of my character? That personal attack?

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  42. 51 years ago today– when America truly was great- and showed the world why…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzjYgfCg2VI

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  43. Alex Berenson is another of those pro-Trump CV19 downtalkers who cherry-picked data from one medical center in one county in TX. Anyone who wants to “read the stats” can go right to the stats. For extra credit, take that spreadsheet and compute the statewide 7-day moving average and anyone can see that it has hospitalizations have increased every single day since May 27th.

    Paul Montagu (5ffc5f)

  44. “62% of registered voters say President Trump is hurting efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus”

    Why would they think that?

    Discourages masks… check.

    Encourages mass indoor rallies… check.

    Ignores social distancing… check.

    Requests testing reductions… check.

    Attacks medical experts…. check.

    Encourages unproven remedies… check.

    Could the man do worse?

    noel (4d3313)

  45. Omg:

    WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows says PeterNavarro45 was wrong to have written that Op-Ed critical of Dr Fauci, but Fauci was wrong to have said the Coronavirus pandemic is as bad or worse than the 1918 epidemic. “Not only is that false, it’s irresponsible,” said Meadows on Fox.

    Here is what Fauci said yesterday, followed by his clarification:

    “This is a pandemic of historic proportions. I think we can’t deny that fact. It’s something I think that when history looks back on it, it will be comparable to what we saw in 1918,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

    “If you look at the magnitude of the 1918 pandemic, where anywhere from 50 to 75 to 100 million people globally died, I mean, that was the mother of all pandemics and truly historic,” Fauci said. “I hope we don’t even approach that with (COVID-19) but it does have the makings or the possibility of approaching that in seriousness.”

    “That was influenza, this is coronavirus, that essentially thrust itself onto the human population,” he said. “It had two characteristics that are the thing that make it, as I say, ‘the perfect storm.’ And that is a virus that jumps species, but that almost immediately has an extraordinarily, capable and efficient way of spreading from human to human. Simultaneously with having a considerable degree of morbidity and mortality.”

    Fauci clarified his remarks a day late in a livestreamed conversation on Thursday with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, saying he was not referring to the current status of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    “I want to clarify that, I had used the word ‘comparable,’ and I think that may have been taken out of context because people would have thought, ‘My goodness, we’re having this now, is it going to be the 50 to 100 million people in 1918?’ No, they’re not comparable in that way at all in severity, they’re very very different,” Fauci told Zuckerberg.

    “I don’t want anybody to think there’s severity comparability to what was experienced in 1918.”

    Dana (25e0dc)

  46. 26. We’re all “indifferent,” as you seem to understand the term, to nearly 8000 Americans who die every day of various-and-sundry non-CoViD-19 causes. I know to an absolute certitude that you don’t weep for every car accident victim, every abortion victim ripped from the womb, or every nursing home patient that dies well into their 80’s, 90’s, or beyond, let alone do you weep for every heart attack or drug overdose victim that dies before their time. And you know why you don’t? Because the media doesn’t “care” enough to tell you about them.

    Contrary to what some seem to think here, I’m not a cruel and uncaring person. But I’m not fearful either. Another thing I know with 100% certainty is that I will die. You will die. Everyone dies. It’s only a matter of how and when. I’d rather worry about living while I am still alive than fret over when my time will be up.

    Gryph (08c844)

  47. 45… what’s the avg. stay of those hospitalized? Death rate increasing or decreasing?

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  48. We’re all “indifferent,” as you seem to understand the term, to nearly 8000 Americans who die every day of various-and-sundry non-CoViD-19 causes.

    Speak for yourself. That attitude is not normal, but people who feel this way spend their whole lives trying to normalize it, insisting everyone is coldly self-centered. No, that’s not normal at all.

    LOL. You mean my personal attack on your evidence-free smear of my character? That personal attack?

    lurker (d8c5bc) — 7/16/2020 @ 10:26 am

    You could spend your whole life explaining it to him and he would never understand that what he said was an attack, and your explaining it to him was not. Trump’s real genius was harnessing this sort of thing, but I think both fringes do it.

    Dustin (d0158a)

  49. Three were friends.

    Lurker, I sympathize. I lost two.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  50. I have never had a friend or relative die in a car crash.

    I have never had a friend or relative die of the flue.

    In the first 2 weeks of April, I lost two friends to Covid-19.

    You can take your statistics (which you don’t know how to use anyway) and put them where the sun don’t shine.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  51. *flu

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  52. #52, 53.
    Thanks, and my sympathies for your losses as well.

    The closest comparison to COVID in my experience was Nam. I was too young to be personally involved, but old enough to remember nightly news reports, and I wince even now at the mental image of body counts, which seemed big to me at the time, and of agonized loved ones. I knew two people killed over eight years, neither well, and that felt like a lot.

    Now, not unlike you, I lost three friends in a little over a month. That blows everything previous right out of the water.

    lurker (d8c5bc)

  53. 53. Statistics aren’t there to be “used.” It’s simple math, Kevin. And facts don’t care about your feelings. When people start panicing during flu season and start weeping for the thousands of people who die in car crashes on a daily basis, I might start coming around. I don’t seeing that happen, though. There’s not a lot of rational thought here.

    *SNORT* “Misusing statistics.” That’s rich.

    Gryph (08c844)

  54. While we’re comiserating here, I lost my brother to a huffing incident. I nearly lost my father to a heart attack. My grandmother passed away at the age of 86 from a stroke, and I saw an interview on TV about someone who lost his grandmother to CoViD (supposedly) at the age of 89! I’m supposed to feel bad for someone who loses their grandparent at the age of 89 just because of how she died? That rates a news segment on a major television network?! I can’t even…

    Gryph (08c844)

  55. I lost my first uncle to heart attack at 54, my grandfather to a stroke occassioned by complication from heart attack at 84, i know what does it matter i chose not to smoke because of that.

    Narciso (7404b5)


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