A poll last week from The Washington Post and ABC News indicates that the United States is 100 percent messed up.
That's not a direct finding. The simple question of whether the 1,001 respondents believed the nation was messed up was not asked.
That conclusion was made evident, though, by an easy interpretation of the confused and complex findings.
Let's take a look, for example, at American attitudes reflected in the poll affecting the preposterous second-place and Russian-endorsed president.
Donald Trump's job-approval rating inched up slightly but was still horrible after the issuance of Robert Mueller's report that respondents tended to find credible. Respondents were inclined to believe the report had shown Trump to be a liar who may well have obstructed justice and certainly was not exonerated as he said. But respondents did not think Trump should now be subjected to Democratic House initiatives to begin consideration of impeachment.
Got that? If so, I'm glad someone does.
Respondents--65 percent on cell phones and 35 percent on landlines--found the Mueller report to have revealed Trump unfavorably. But his approval/disapproval rating post-report came in via this poll at 39/54, up from January's 37/58.
That is to say that Americans did not personally respect Trump before and that they found Mueller's report to have confirmed what they knew already, and that, in fact, they now think maybe a tad more highly of this atrocity of whom their negative opinion was confirmed.
We seem jaded and numbed. Do we think our president is a good or decent man? Nah. Do we think he ought to be impeached? Nah.
Here are the other poll numbers, beyond those on general job approval, that support the synopsis above: Respondents found credibility in the Mueller report by 51-21; accepted Trump's assertion of exoneration in that report by only 31-53; thought he was a truth-teller as evidenced by the report by an even worse 31-58; thought he probably interfered with justice by 47-41, but wanted impeachment proceedings begun only by 37-58.
The confused findings extended to other issues:
• Though respondents clearly didn't want to endure impeachment, House Democrats must consider the fact that 62 percent of Democratic respondents favored impeachment, including 70 percent of African American respondents, who logically see injustice in giving a rich white man a pass when not many passes are given by the police where they live.
• The economy performs well and ought to be Trump's best ticket to a second term, and probably is, except that 60 percent of respondents said the economy performs best for the elite rich for whom it's rigged, which feeds the populist movement of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the Democratic side.
• Immigration is emerging as more complex than a 35 percent base that supports Trump's signature intolerance and the 50-plus percent who find him demagogic or mean. The recent asylum-seeking explosion on the southern border has caused the percentage of respondents who believe immigration to be a crisis to rise from 24 percent in January to 35 percent now, driven mostly by ... Democrats, who went from 7 percent three months ago to 24 percent now in seeing a crisis.
Views on immigration are even more confused than that. On Trump's declaring an emergency in February to release funds for construction of his border wall, 64 percent of respondents disapproved. But on the question of whether the Democratic congressional caucus or Trump was more to blame for the border crisis, 35 percent cited congressional Democrats and 32 percent Trump.
That's probably a simple party-line sentiment. But it seems to suggest that Americans blame Congress for not passing comprehensive immigration reform and blame Trump for the way he's handling things in the absence of congressional action.
And that, now that you think about it, may not be illogical at all.
In fact, it may be that the mess is less in Americans' confused and complex opinions than in the mess of confused and complex situations into which their politicians of both parties have thrust them.
In that regard, respondents in the poll said by 72 percent that the American political system is rigged to favor the wealthy and elite.
They do not appear to believe that this president has drained the swamp or made America great again.
That's not to say they might not re-elect him.
It will depend entirely on the quality of the opponent and the dynamic of the matchup.
A Trump-Joe Biden race would bear scant similarity in terms of emphasis to a Trump-Bernie Sanders or Trump-Elizabeth Warren race.
Which of these will dominate voters' moods next year--the greater mess of the presidency, or the greater mess of the alternative?
It's a mess either way, of course. At least that much is clear.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/02/2019