Ask A Genius 795: FDR and Canon
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/19
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: All right so they started doing presidential approval surveys towards the end of FDR’s administration a little more than 40 years ago and there’s a trend that’s accelerated over the past 20 years where as America grows more polarized people’s support of the president has gone down. So the presidents who were surveyed say 60 years ago, 50 years ago often had approvals in the 50s the 60s and then the last few presidents have been in the 40s. So Biden started off well above 50% but quickly faded into the 40s, then a year ago he kind of pretty quickly pulled us out of Afghanistan and that cratered his approval. Now, he long wanted to get us out of Afghanistan and Trump had come to an agreement with the Taliban that said we were getting out of Afghanistan. We’d been there for more than 20 years, it’s the longest war in American history and it wasn’t going to end well no matter what we did but his pull out cost him maybe eight points of approval.
Over the past two months he’s gotten a lot of stuff done; the infrastructure act that nobody’s been able to get through for more than a decade, something called the inflation reduction act which does a lot of stuff, he’s forgiving 10,000 dollars of student loans if you earn less than 125000 a year. So all this stuff has helped his approval and shown that he can get stuff done even though the Senate is equally divided. He was first elected to the Senate in 1972 and he’s got 15 years more experience in holding national office than any other president and it kind of shows in terms of what he’s been able to get done even with the slimmest of margins in the Senate and the House. So his approval has been picking up though he’s still in the low 40s. That’s what’s been going on with him that he’s been proving himself to be reasonably effective, amazingly effective given the politics of right now.
The Republicans have been proving themselves to be just pieces of shit. There are more than a dozen investigations into Trump and the people around Trump, both at the federal level and in various States and he just stupidly stole classified documents, stupidly refused to give them back, and still makes noises like he’s going to run for president and has embraced QAnon. Do I need to go into what QAnon is?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I guess if you want, yeah.
Rosner: QAnon is an insane conspiracy theory of the far-right that says that a bunch of celebrities are pedophiles and they also cook and eat kids and that Trump is the savior of the nation and he and his forces will eventually expose all the pedophiles and execute them. Pedophiles including people like Tom Hanks. They also believe that JFK Jr. didn’t really die and he’s coming back. They believe just a bunch of crazy I mean just full-on stupid bullshit. At his last rally in Ohio over the weekend, Trump wore a Q button on his lapel and he led the audience in I guess the Q salute which is like a Sieg Heil except with just one finger extended. The Republicans after getting rid of the federal right to have an abortion via the Supreme Court, they said it’ll just go to the states and individual states can decide but Senator Lindsey Graham just introduced a bill that would prohibit abortion after the 15th week at the federal level breaking the promise that the Republicans had made. So the Republicans are being full on assholes and Biden’s being somewhat affected.
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So what was going to be a Republican slaughter in the House in the election that’s coming up in eight weeks now has shifted where the Democrats have a chance of holding on to the house and they’ve got a strong chance of keeping the Senate because the Republicans are just being so loathsome and a lot of the candidates they’re running are just pieces of shit, those in Georgia. Herschel Walker the Republican candidate for Senate and the guy seems to have brain damage from football. He can’t speak well and when he does speak he tells outrageous lies like he graduated summa cum laude from college when he didn’t graduate at all. He’s got illegitimate kids all over the place; I don’t know what the rest of this shit is. A lot of, I mean not all the Republican candidates, but a good half dozen or more are anti-Semites or have people who are about anti-Semites working on their campaigns, they’re just really scumbag-y right now which is disturbing and frightening but is maybe cause for optimism because a lot of them are just too shitty for any reasonable person to vote for them. So that’s where we stand.
According to 538, which is a poll aggregator, as of today the Democrats have a 71% chance of holding on to the Senate and the 29% chance of holding on to the House. If they lose the House, the Congressional hearings into Trump go away because that depends on the Democrats running the House. If the Republicans take the House they might try to impeach Biden for no legitimate reason. So, Republicans can’t really fuck things up too bad because Biden’s the president for two more years and he can just veto any crazy shit that the Republicans get through but they can shut down some of the investigations into Trump. Hannity on Fox News was showing that how much the Democrats are out to get Trump and in Chiron he just did a scroll of 32 investigations that have something to do with Trump which I believe overstates it but there’s just a lot of investigating into Trump and Trump has really hurt himself by being super guilty of some of the stuff that that’s being investigated. So that’s where we are.
[Recording End]
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