Voters who don’t know anything about Donald Trump kind of like Donald Trump

More adventures (gift link) in the political life of the marginal American voter:

Voters who have not heard much about some of the many major news events from the first 100 days of Mr. Trump’s second term have a higher opinion of the job he is doing, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. A little under half of the 42 percent of voters who approved of the job Mr. Trump is doing as president said they had not heard much about at least some of the ups and downs of his administration’s decisions. . .

Voters were more likely to approve of how Mr. Trump is handling immigration if they had not heard much about the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, who the administration acknowledges was mistakenly deported. Officials have insisted he is a member of the MS-13 gang, and have made little effort to help him return to the United States.

Voters who had not heard about this and other immigration-related cases were also more likely to say Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration had been about right or had not gone far enough.

I wonder if this is true for people who have no idea what the hell is going on with tariffs, or how to spell that word?

The start of Mr. Trump’s term included the worst drop in the S&P 500 for a new president since 1974, when Gerald R. Ford took over from Richard M. Nixon after the Watergate scandal.

And while most Americans have heard about the stock market fluctuations, 20 percent have heard little about them or nothing at all.

Those voters were much more likely to approve of Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy. Overall, 55 percent who had not heard much about stock market fluctuations approved, compared with 41 percent of voters who had heard more about the fluctuations.

I just completed a 65,000-word Edvard Munch-style scream about the last ten years in America. Here are a few of them:

For a decade now, much of the American political class has been committed to the unconscious project of denying to itself that what is happening in this country is actually happening.

Remember, in that vein, “this is the day Donald Trump became president?”  That day kept recurring during the early years of the first Trump presidency, whenever very serious people found the tiniest speck of evidence that Donald Trump, real estate scam artist, perpetual bankrupt, reality TV star, self-confessed grabber of unwilling women’s genitalia (note to historians in the far future, if any: this actually happened; it isn’t, in the style of the most outrageous stories about Caligula et al, something that his political enemies made up), and unparalleled publicity whore, was somehow “growing” into the office of the presidency.  

Yes, many a pundit announced this over and over again, until after approximately the 77^th time that Trump did something more outrageously stupid than any other president had ever done, on the day after yet another day on which he had supposedly really become president.  Then they finally stopped.  But it went on for a long time, and this is why:

Because what happened in this country, and what is now happening again, except far more egregiously this time because The Adults in the Room are all long gone, is so completely unbelievable.

It simply cannot be the case that the president of the United States of America is, to use the technical term from the relevant political science scholarly literature, a complete fucking idiot.  Because if that were the case, that would suggest something indescribably horrible about not only our entire political system, but about the broader culture within which that system exists.

It gets a little less tactful later on.