I’m watching Deadline Whitehouse on MSNOW, which I think is one of the best shows of political analysis we have. The current episode is covering recent polls, and Nicolle Wallace just said, “Trump’s poll numbers are approaching Richard Nixon levels just before his resignation.” In fact, at its low point Nixon’s approval rating was 24%. Trump’s numbers are now 34% (average of four polls: Quinnipiac, AP-NORC, CNN, Reuters/IPSOS).

To tell the truth, I am always astounded that Trump’s approval numbers are as high as they are. How can anyone take this “man” seriously, about anything? But let’s put them in perspective.

Let’s not forget that with Nixon, there was a televised, bipartisan effort in Congress to hold his Administration to account. The crimes of Nixon and his White House mafia became very public — and the public basically could not avoid them. 

If we had similar accountability today, imagine how low Trump’s numbers could be — because the fact is, Nixon’s corruption pales in comparison to Trump’s, and ceteris paribus, Nixon was in many respects a competent if often wrongheaded and misguided president. The word “competence” never belongs in the same sentence as “Trump,” unless its a sentence like, “In measures of competence, Donald Trump scores 0.” Or, “The primary competence that Donald Trump has is to corrupt everything he touches.” 

Let’s remember that in 1974 the American public was getting its information from three TV networks, local radio stations that were linked in national networks, and local newspapers that got much of their national information and reporting from the AP and UPI news organizations. At all levels and in all channels, professional, responsible reporting was the norm.

Today, we have a situation much more akin to the “Yellow Journalism” of the 1890s: partisan networks like Fox, control of local media outlets by ideologically driven conglomerates like Sinclair, siloed and biased social media channels like X. The point of much “news” is not fact but belief, and in most cases professional journalists have been replaced by professional entertainers masquerading as journalists.

So, let’s apply a corrective to the Trump poll numbers: I’m guessing that if we had real accountability and real reporting, his numbers would be much, much lower — something like approval rates of 10%, and only that high because we have to account for the ostriches that are part of every society.

So these are major challenges facing democracy at the present: (1) Our Republican-majority Congress is incapable of acting with a backbone. That, fortunately, is a fixable problem, if we can turn out enough voters to elect Dems in the midterms (and if — sadly a bigger if than it should be — a Democratic Congress works aggressively to hold Trump and his henchmen to account). (2) This is the harder problem: how do we reconstruct, for our age of technology, a news environment that is actually conducive to democratic deliberation and not just intellectual gerrymandering?