The Tribune

with CHARLIE HARPER

FROM Tucker Carlson to Chris Matthews, the Washington DC punditry has already turned more decisively against US President Donald Trump. Often, such a big swing in commentary represents little more than follow-the-leader and try to keep up with his or her ratings success.

This feels different. It suggests that something significant may be brewing just behind the scenes regarding a president whose low public approval ratings match or exceed the worst levels for those of his recent predecessors.

Matthews, who is six months older than Trump, retired six years ago from a 23-year run as a prime-time leftie commentator on MSNBC and elsewhere and has been comparatively quiet since then, although he has written a book. Once a staffer for House speaker and noted Democratic king-maker Tip O’Neill, Matthews has now remerged as a semi-regular commentator on ‘Morning Joe,’ the morning stalwart on MS NOW, the rebranded MSNBC.

Looking every bit his age, staunchly Roman Catholic Matthews held forth this week on the political idiocy and religious sacrilege of Trump’s willingness to see himself depicted as Jesus Christ healing the sick, and vice president JD Vance challenging the supremely popular new American Pope Leo XIV to stay in his lane and out of commenting on the US war with Iran.

Matthews’ biting remarks are less a surprise than his reappearance on national television, where the make-up artists haven’t been able to conceal the ravages of age from his face and neck.

There has been no such problem with still vital-looking Carlson, 56, whose prime-time talk show on Fox News led the ratings for his time slot for most of the seven years he spent there. Carlson was dismissed in 2023 in the wake of the network paying out almost $900 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by a voting machine manufacturer he joined others in accusing of fraud during the 2020 election. Before he left, though, Carlson had boosted the profile of Vance to a level that made him Trump’s choice for running mate in 2024.

"I do think it’s like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences," Carlson said, referring to the role of his and others' support for Trump. "You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be, and I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional."

Carlson, a long-time supporter of the president and beneficiary of his favour, referred in his video statement to having campaigned for Trump: "I’m implicated in this, for sure."

Iconoclastic magazine Mother Jones opined that “Carlson is one of many conservative commentators who now want you to believe they were sold a fake bill of goods. From Marjorie Taylor Greene to Candace Owens, Alex Jones, and Megyn Kelly, right-wing commentators see Trump’s MAGA base defecting. Are these right-wing ideologues suddenly principled defenders of conservative values? Not a chance. They’re all just hucksters who sense a good business opportunity.”

That may be true, but this good business opportunity is the result of Trump’s current slump.

While the comments and revelations of pundits can make headlines, it says here that the real test of whether Trump is really faltering politically will come in the actions of the Senate majority leader John Thune of South Dakota and House speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana.  Leaders with vastly differing styles and superficially differing degrees of fealty to Trump, these two have nevertheless kept their caucuses pretty consistently in line with what the president has wanted to do.

If they, and the GOP colleagues they lead in Congress, begin to slide away from Trump on legislative priorities, that will be a clear sign that these politicians recognize that the president has become a political liability significant enough to endanger their highest priority – their own re-election.

Then all bets will be off, and what has seemed inconceivable for the past decade might well be reasonably considered: The removal or side-lining of this president, significantly unopposed or even supported by some members of his own party.

US presidents entering their second terms in office in this century have been consistently whacked in their first mid-term elections after re-election. So, forecasts of a coming Democratic landslide actually represent a safe bet at this point. But polls and Tuesday’s election result in Virginia do make it seem probable that the GOP is wise to brace for a real hit in November.

On Tuesday, Virginians voted to approve a change to the state’s constitution that would permit, this year, a realigning of the state’s 11 congressional districts designed to move four of Virginia’s five current Republican-held seats to the Democratic column in the November general election.

Prospective maps of the new districts widely circulated before Tuesday’s vote showed that the new districts would represent some of the most severe – and seamy – efforts at gerrymandering that the US has seen in many years.

Republicans opposed to the measure quickly seized on the apparent hypocrisy of liberal leaders from former president Barack Obama to Virginia’s newly-elected Democratic governor Abigail Spanberger, who had previously both long been on the record as staunchly opposed to gerrymandering. The GOP also spent a lot of money airing TV ads showing these leaders harshly criticising the practice.

So why did the Democratic-controlled state legislature approve this ballot measure?

The Virginia legislature and national Democrats initially tried to make the case that this initiative was temporary and only in response to the ‘unethical and immoral’ Republican-led redistricting in Texas and North Carolina openly designed to add GOP-held seats this November. The Virginia proposal, they said, was simply ‘balancing things to re-establish a level playing field.’ Before last week the message had merely become: resisting Trump.

Many voters were asking, nonetheless, if two wrongs do make a right. The Dems say that playing by the rules with Trump have landed them in their position of weak and feckless opposition. Now, their message is that to fight this president, you have to get down in the mud and grapple with him on his own terms.

Maybe.

But while Spanberger rolled to a huge 15-point victory in her race for governor last November, her support for the Democratic gerrymandering has lowered her approval rating to a mere single point now. It may turn out that Virginia voters won’t give the Dems all four of those extra seats they now expect in six months.

Like many blue or blue-leaning states, Virginia had approved a Congressional districting system that draws legislative boundary lines once every 10 years, following the national census, in a non-partisan fashion that has inspired pride and confidence among voters there and elsewhere. To abandon such a high-minded decision for the sake of political expediency has clearly left a sour taste in the mouths of many Virginians, including thousands of party loyalists who supported Tuesday’s successful effort.

We can expect a steady drumbeat of speculation until November that parties engineering the most brazen gerrymandering may be rewarded with disappointment in the general election, and that the net change after all this expensive, and distracting manoeuvring may be nothing.

Meantime, Trump himself has maintained his practice of near-constant availability to the press corps that travels with him and awaits his appearance on the White House lawn as he escorts a foreign leader to the door or walks to his waiting helicopter for a trip to Palm Beach or elsewhere.

He is getting all the press and notoriety he could hope for.

But the positive effect on his political prospects has dimmed considerably. As usual, the fault lies almost entirely with the president himself. His remarks and behaviour in comparing himself to Jesus, especially coming around Easter earlier this month, were astonishing even by his own standards of crudity and offensiveness.

Add that to Trump’s cascade of calumny and criticism of America’s long-time Western European allies and other nations who may appear to defy him on his policies and demands, and the picture emerges of a man slumping into a kind of pathological dementia that might render him unfit to continue in office long enough to fulfil his current term as president.

And this president’s conduct of his war with Iran seems so scattered, inconsistent, and aimless that as American military casualties inevitably rise along with gas prices, his support could vanish.