WHAT ARE YOU GONNA BELIEVE -- DECADES OF PROPAGANDA OR YOUR LYING EYES?

In The New York Times today, Thomas Edsall quotes Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia, who says (in Edsall's summary of her remarks) that "Trump's second term agenda ... is elite-driven." Rudman tells Edsall:

There is no indication that these new Trump voters, his winning margin, voted for demolition of the basic structures of governance in this country as DOGE has done, impeding the services, e.g., social security and Medicaid, and the jobs upon which they depend.

While there's no indication that swing voters who chose Trump in November voted for these cuts to basic services, or cuts to scientific and medical research, it's becoming clear that they aren't particularly outraged as these cuts are being made. Trump's poll numbers dropped significantly in the immediate aftermath of his "Liberation Day" tariff announcement, but now that Trump has partially suspended the tariffs, his poll numbers are improving dramatically -- at RealClearPolling he's at 47.1% approval and at 49.6% disapproval, a significant improvement over his 45.1%/52.3% split on April 29.

I have a theory about why swing voters who chose Trump in 2024 aren't up in arms about service cuts at Social Security, the VA, FEMA, and elsewhere: They think government services were always bad -- even when, in their own experience, those services were delivered well.

There's no place in America, liberal, moderate, or conservative, where people would nod in agreement if you said, for example, "The Social Security Administration is doing a really great job." We simply don't praise the government that way. No one does. That's true even though most Social Security recipients get their checks or their automatic deposits without fail every month. Most Medicare recipients get their claims paid efficiently. Most people like the U.S. Postal Service. But most people have also been told for decades -- even before Ronald Reagan's presidency -- that the government is a sinkhole of "waste, fraud, and abuse," and that government employees aren't very good at their jobs. (We use the phrase "close enough for government work" as a synonym for "not carefully done," even though it had the opposite meaning during World War II.) People have been conditioned to expect the worst of government, even if that's not their experience. And now they're getting what they expect.

I think this also why the Trump administration's blatant corruption isn't hurting the president in the polls. Maybe voters don't think Trump should accept that Qatari plane, but his poll numbers are going up in spite of the scandal. Voters don't seem particularly upset about all the crypto cash Trump is receiving, or about his real estate deals in the Middle East, or about stories like this:

Vietnam approves a $1.5 billion Trump golf resort project as tariff talks loom

As trade tensions between Washington and Hanoi escalate, Vietnam has approved a $1.5 billion investment from the Trump Organization to build golf courses, hotels, and real estate....

Vietnam, the largest U.S. trading partner in Southeast Asia, has long been a focal point of President Donald Trump’s tariff push.

I think I understand this. All my life, ordinary people have said the same thing about politicians: "They're all crooks!" So now when we have a politician who's clearly much more of a crook than any previous president, they appear to be shrugging it off. Even though they clearly aren't all this bad, voters think they are, so they don't seem to care much about how Trump is cashing in on the presidency.

I think this will change when there's an entrenched economic downturn, but I'm beginning to question whether there'll be widespread, sustained disillusionment with Trump before that. Voters' expectations of government are very, very low. Trumpism is extremely destructive, but the end result is a government that's as bad as the American people think government is, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.