Ask A Genius 1555: Trump’s Sliding Polls and Shutdown Fallout
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/29
Wole Soyinka says the U.S. revoked his visa after he renounced residency; any thoughts?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen presses Rick Rosner on why Donald Trump’s approval is deflating amid cost of living strain, tariffs, and a long federal shutdown. Rosner, who places tiny prediction bets, expects support to hover in the low forties. He argues Trump’s chaos distracts from policy failures, with inflation near three percent and looming insurance hikes hurting households. He criticizes ICE’s accountability and leadership, citing broader abuses of power. On Wole Soyinka’s visa, he decries political vindictiveness. Addressing elevated stillbirths, he points to COVID’s long tail, deferred care from affordability barriers, and persistent racial inequities in maternal and infant health outcomes.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s do a little bit of politics. Trump’s popularity has dipped, according to Reuters, apparently because of cost-of-living issues that many Americans are now facing. There’s a lot going on.
Rick Rosner: Last month, I started placing small bets—just a dollar or so—on Trump’s popularity at the end of the month or the beginning of the next. This month, I’ve got $1.20 riding on his approval rating being in the 44s, somewhere between 44.0 and 44.9 percent.
On November 1st, I have another bet covering the 43s, where he usually sits. Right now, his rating is at 43.3 percent on The Silver Bulletin—that’s Nate Silver’s aggregation of all the polls he considers reliable. I have another dollar riding on his popularity being above 42.5 percent on November 1st. I’ll probably lose the 44 percent bet and maybe the 43 percent one, but not the 42.5 percent. It can’t fall that far.
Anyway, his popularity is slowly deflating. The story you mentioned says it’s economic, and that makes sense. But with Trump, there’s always a lot going on. There’s always a lot going on. I don’t even know if you can call it a strategy—he’s such a chaotic guy that…
Does he even have strategies? Doing and saying a lot of things has worked well for him because it distracts from every other outrageous thing he says or does. But there are plenty of issues that could weigh on him now. The tariffs are all slowly kicking in, and inflation is back up to around 3%. That’s not enough to cause panic, but I think it’s going to keep climbing.
The government has been shut down for—what are we at now?—day 28, I think. In a few days, it’ll be the longest shutdown in U.S. history. People aren’t getting paid: the military, 1.4 million government employees, and SNAP benefits—food assistance—will soon run out for around 41 or 42 million Americans, tens of millions of them children. That’s about one-eighth of the U.S. population.
Trump isn’t even in the country to deal with it. He’s been over in Japan and Malaysia, and he’s also spending time at the White House overseeing a $300 million renovation to build a new ballroom.
Among the things he was elected to do, he’s been somewhat successful at shutting down the border—there aren’t many people crossing anymore. ICE, however, is another story. They’re not rounding up “bad hombres”; they’re rounding up mostly working people who’ve never broken the law. And ICE has a brutal, toxic culture.
I bounced at bars for 25 years, and I learned firsthand that when you put a bunch of aggressive people together without oversight, their behavior deteriorates fast. You see it in police departments too—when there’s no accountability, bad cops egg each other on because there are benefits to being a bad cop. You get to beat people up, intimidate others, and sometimes exploit your position in other ways.
In my bouncing days, I saw guys use their power for sexual coercion at clubs. Cops have even more power, which can lead to worse abuse. At ICE, there’s no leadership insisting on accountability, and it shows. The agency’s culture is rotten from the top down.
Kristi Noem, for instance, is notorious for shooting a puppy she didn’t like and a goat that smelled—which all goats do, by the way. Her lieutenant, Corey Lewandowski, is married but has been having an affair with her for years, and he’s got his own reputation for being, let’s say, “handsy.” So ICE is being run by creeps.
On top of that, on November 1st, people will start receiving their health insurance bills for 2026, and many are going to see their costs double or triple. A family making $85,000 a year might suddenly have to pay $24,000 for medical coverage—which is absurd.
So, with all this happening—tariffs, inflation, the government shutdown, ICE’s abuses, and exploding healthcare costs—Trump’s popularity is bound to keep slipping. He was elected to secure the border and lower costs for Americans. He’s only half-delivered on the first and failed spectacularly on the second, all while doing a ton of other nonsense no one asked him to do. His popularity’s deflating for good reason.
His popularity is slowly declining. It’s been hovering in the 43–44 percent range for three, maybe six months—I’ve lost track. He’s only been president again for about nine months, but it’s the same pattern as his first term. Until the country fell apart under COVID in 2020, he ran the same numbers—low 40s, remarkably stable.
So, we’re seeing the same thing again. His popularity is surprisingly steady for such a chaotic guy. But yeah, it’s slowly deflating.
Jacobsen: Nobel Prize–winning author Wole Soyinka, age 91, said in 2016 that he had torn up his U.S. green card and renounced his American residency in protest after Donald Trump was elected. He’s now announced that the U.S. has revoked his visa. Any thoughts?
Rosner: Yeah, that’s just more dickishness. The first time Trump was president, he at least had a few competent people around him. The one I always mention is his secretary of state—Rex Tillerson, the former head of ExxonMobil. He only lasted about a year. This time, Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants—half of them billionaires, and around forty who used to work at Fox News. They’re not just unqualified; they were brought in to dismantle the government, to make it work worse if they felt like it. It’s a much nastier crew.
One of the things they’ve been doing is targeting people they don’t like politically, especially at the border. If you’re not a natural-born citizen—if you’re naturalized, have a green card, or are here on a student visa—and you say something they don’t like, they’ll find a way to mess with you. Even though the First Amendment protects free speech, they still intimidate people.
When I travel, I actually keep two Twitter accounts. One is where I complain about politics, and the other is quieter. The quieter one is on my phone, so if customs ever demands to check my device, there’s less for them to see.
We’re lucky to live in Los Angeles, in a blue state. Customs officials here are probably less inclined to hassle people. When we come back into the country, it’s usually through LAX. If we were returning through Texas, maybe we’d get hassled more—but so far, we’ve been fine.
Jacobsen: There’s been an above-average level of stillbirths in the United States, particularly affecting low-income communities. Any thoughts?
Rosner: That’s concerning. One thing to look at over the past five years is the rate of people infected with COVID. If you get a bad or even moderate case, or long COVID, the virus can infiltrate all sorts of bodily systems. It’s inflammatory and can cause damage you might not even notice. So when you see troubling health trends like rising stillbirth rates, COVID has to be one of the prime suspects.
Another possible factor is that people struggling to pay for medical care or insurance might simply be seeing doctors less often. During the height of COVID, cancer rates appeared to rise—not because the virus caused cancer, but because people were avoiding hospitals and clinics, as they were told to, which meant diagnostic exams were delayed by months. So, for me, the number one suspect in most recent health crises is COVID. Number two is the inability to afford care. And number three—when it involves infants—is the persistent racial disparities in U.S. healthcare. Black Americans’ medical concerns, including pain and complications during pregnancy, are statistically taken less seriously.
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