Living underwater
By As we discussed yesterday, Occam’s razor suggests that Disney very quickly backed down because the public support for its immediate acquiescence just isn’t there:
Last week, ABC/Disney canceled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of television stations that carry the program. The backlash has been swift: As I pointed out Saturday morning, search interest for “Cancel Disney+” has hit an all-time high — even higher than the boycott movements from when Disney “went woke” in 2020-2022. The current Disney boycott is now 4x as large as any over the last 5 years, gauged by search interest.
And this is just an iteration of the fact that Trump is just not a popular president:
This is not limited to internet posters and Google searchers; investors are worried too. Disney’s stock is down 2% over the last week, while the overall market is up nearly 1%.
This all intersects with a point I’ve been making in this newsletter for a while: many people fundamentally underestimate how unpopular Trump is. As the Disney episode illustrates, they do this at their own peril.
Compare Trump’s topline job approval (-11) to that of other recent presidents, and he stands out quite clearly (not in a good way):
The president’s entire domestic policy agenda is underwater, too — especially on the economy and inflation, the two issues that won him the 2024 election:
As Morris says, the opposition to Trump is also more intense than his support, which is also evident in the special election returns.
My one qualification is that in many cases elites aren’t overestimating Trump’s support so much as they are just going along with Trump because they support what he’s doing. But there is a pretty strong tendency to assume that Republican presidents represent the Real America and hence any election victory is a broad mandate for their entire agenda. In fact, Trump won a narrow victory that was well below replacement-level for the typical non-incumbent in that time period, and his governing as if he won a massive landslide is alienating a lot of voters. None of this is reason to be complacent, but it’s also not consistent with the evidence to be defeatist.