Friday Focus: Public opinion on Trump, Cohen’s Russia meeting, Middle East update, NC GOP overrides veto

By Robert A. Vella

There’s no doubt about it.  Public opinion polls consistently show declining support for President Trump both generally and on specific issues.  His overall approval rating has dipped to 39% matching his previous low in August 2017 after the deadly racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.  47% of Americans are blaming him for the government shutdown compared to 33% who are blaming Democrats.  Regarding the $5+ billion Trump is demanding for his pet white elephant (i.e. a border wall), the polling numbers are even worse with just 19% of respondents supporting such an expenditure.  If that news isn’t bad enough for the president, public opinion supporting congressional action against him certainly must be with nearly 60% of voters wanting Trump impeached and removed from office or formerly censured.  Trump’s political situation is so precarious that Fox News, that bastion of right-wing propaganda, is now piling on the criticism.  Calls for impeachment are definitely heating up especially from those who were involved with or are intimately familiar with the Watergate scandal which brought down President Nixon.  From:  Watergate reporter pens op-ed on ‘inevitability’ of Trump’s impeachment

“An impeachment process against President Trump now seems inescapable. Unless the president resigns, the pressure by the public on the Democratic leaders to begin an impeachment process next year will only increase,” journalist Elizabeth Drew wrote in an op-ed published by The New York Times on Thursday.

Drew points to several happenings in the past few weeks – including Trump’s decision to pull American troops out of Syria, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s resignation, the partial government shutdown, and new revelations in investigations involving the president – as events that she claims have “instilled a new sense of alarm among many Republicans.”

“It always seemed to me that Mr. Trump’s turbulent presidency was unsustainable and that key Republicans would eventually decide that he had become too great a burden to the party or too great a danger to the country. That time may have arrived,” Drew continued.

“In the end the Republicans will opt for their own political survival,” she wrote. “Almost from the outset some Senate Republicans have speculated on how long his presidency would last. Some surely noticed that his base didn’t prevail in the midterms.”

New reporting is reasserting the allegation originally made in the Steele dossier that Trump’s former longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen had met with Russians during late summer of 2016 in or near Prague, Czech Republic.  Cohen is repeating his denial that he was never in Prague, but four sources confirm that cellphone towers there had picked up signals from his mobile phone.

Kurdish militias are making urgent appeals to Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-Assad to protect them from being wiped out by Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has been emboldened by Trump’s recent unilateral decision to withdrawal U.S. military forces from Syria.  The Kurds, who are stateless, have been instrumental in countering ISIS in the region and they must now feel betrayed by their U.S. ally.  The vacuum left by America’s sudden withdrawal is being rapidly filled by none other than Russian strongman Vladimir Putin who is calling for a summit meeting between Erdogan and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.  Turkey, being a Sunni Muslim country, has been involved in the larger sectarian war against Shiite Muslim Iran (allied with Assad and Hezbollah in Lebanon) which has been destabilizing the entire Middle East.

Finally, Republicans in North Carolina have overridden a veto by Democratic governor Roy Cooper which puts into law a bill designed – among other things – to prevent the state’s election board from publicly releasing information about election fraud such as that currently being investigated in the state’s 9th congressional district.  The midterm result between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready has been invalidated because of alleged criminal behavior favoring Harris.  What happens next is not known.