Four out of five Americans might take Trump down

The total turnout for yesterday's "Hands Off!" protests was too massive to permit, thus far, a head count. Reported is that "millions" showed up, though gatherings in specific locales have been tabulated, such as 100,000 people in Washington, D.C. and Boston. We do know that 600,000 signed up to attend somewhere between 1,200 and 1,400 "Hands Off" events, the inexact span suggesting how difficult it has been to determine the total number of people who turned out.

Reuters reports the demonstrations "form[ed] the largest single day of protest against President Donald Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk since they launched a rapid-fire effort to overhaul government and expand presidential authority." The protesters' policy targets were the witless closing of entire agencies, including many Social Security offices, human rights abuses, wholesale deportations, the sacking of federal employees by the thousands, the gutting of DEI initiatives and protections for transgender people, and the unfathomable damage being done by RFK at HHS to America's health.

In short, continues Reuters, yesterday was the day for the regime's opponents "to demonstrate their displeasure en masse in response to Trump's raft of executive orders." But these particular opponents' displeasure is the least of Trump's problems. Although the mass demonstrations against his in-progress dictatorship were less than sterling publicity for it, they were organized by "Indivisible, MoveOn and several other groups" (NYT). hence those "displeased" with Trump were displeased with him before he ever put pen to the very first diktat.

His much bigger problem lies in the top number of this graph from Gallup:

In that 81% there are centrists, center-lefters and leftists and, killingly for Trump, a whole lot of Republican voters as well. While the nation is, by and large, still roughly split in its approval of most of Trump's ill-advised, ill-planned and jaw-droppingly ill-executed policies, partisanship dives when it comes to the one policy most likely to eat into a person's bank balance, as shown by the mere 19% of Americans who see eye-to-eye with the autocrat when it comes tariffs. As a retired money manager in New Jersey framed Trump's tax on the world, "It's going to cost the farmers in the red states. It's going to cost people their jobs - certainly their 401Ks. People have lost tens of thousands of dollars." Partisan love stops where personal financial harm begins; it's where MoveOn meets CPAC.

Nor does seething antipathy toward Trump stop at America's edge. Reuters also reports that "hundreds of people protested in European cities on Saturday ... following a bruising week for financial markets after Trump unveiled sweeping global tariffs." (Americans at home and abroad aren't the only ones among the intensely disgruntled. In the imbecile's enduring fashion of "Carelessness Is Job One," when identifying his tariff victims he included the human-uninhabited Australian territories of Heard Island and McDonald Islands. Though no people live there, plenty of penguins do — now, really pissed-off penguins. Accordingly, they opened a social media account at Threads named @PenguinsAgainstTrump, which at last count had 72,000 followers. The incensed, indignant penguins' online bio: "Not sure why we're being tariffed. We love fish and hate fascists.")

Trump, by the way, spent Saturday playing golf in the Florida town of Jupiter, then returned to Mar-a-Lago to further enrich his family and hold "fund-raisers attracting hundreds of donors to his Palm Beach club," writes the Times. After all, no one said there'd be financial pain for everybody.

Politico reports that GOP Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska will soon "introduce a companion bill to the bipartisan Senate legislation aimed at reclaiming Congress’ authority over tariffs." Along with four Republican co-sponsors, the upper chamber's legislation was introduced by Chuck Grassley and Democrat Maria Cantwell, its chief aim: "allowing Congress to vote to end any tariff at any time." Good for them. God's vicar, however, will see to the bill's coup de grâce, for it will never see the House floor. What's more, in one helpful, weeks-old subsection of the Trump regime's still-expanding Enabling Act, House Republicans "effectively barred any lawmaker from trying to force a vote to end the president's emergency declaration he’s used to implement tariffs."

To which I say good for them, too. Let no man put asunder the hellish union of Trump and his comprehensively painful, economy-wrecking ways. And God forbid that he ever morphs into a bloated blob of rattling nerves, whereupon he curtails or cancels his psychotic tariff schemes. Let them live, thrive and be happy in their work, for only then, after the ballot box, can American workers happily thrive again.