**JULY 17, 2020**

Kuttner on TAP

Trump's 54 Percent Approval on the Economy

****

As general support for Trump keeps sinking, there is one anomaly.
According to this July 15

**Wall Street Journal**/NBC poll
,
which finds Biden leading Trump by 11 points, fully 54 percent of
Americans approve of Trump's handling of the economy.

Really? That would be the corona economy, the worst since the Great
Depression, thanks substantially to Trump's catastrophic policies. How
can this possibly be?

I put the question to some leading pollsters and strategists. One person
whom I greatly respect told me that in focus groups several people
volunteered that they credited Trump personally for the supplemental
unemployment checks and one-time $1,200 relief payments

**because his name was on the checks**.

We all laughed when Trump made this happen. Well, the man may be
certifiably insane in several respects, but he is also crazy like a fox.

And his desire to get vivid relief to ordinary working people is also
behind Trump's demand for a suspension of Social Security payroll
taxes. (Let's see if he tries to get his name on the rebates.)

Needless to say, the fact that folks fall for this ploy does not exactly
speak well of the American people. As H.L. Mencken famously observed, no
one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American
public. (The actual quote
was somewhat
more convoluted, but you get the idea.)

All of this reminds me of a remarkable book written in 1857, which I
know about only thanks to Sidney Blumenthal's superb new work on the
run-up to the Civil War, All the Powers of Earth
. The
earlier book,

**The Impending Crisis of the South**, by the abolitionist Hinton Rowan
Helper, was the first to make the point that poor, non-slaveholding
whites, outnumbering slaveholders by more than five to one, were
victimized by slavery almost as much as Blacks. "Never were the poorer
classes of a people," Helper wrote
, "so basely duped, so
adroitly swindled ..."

Does this ring a distant bell? The duped poor whites of slavery days,
who supported wealthy slaveholders because downtrodden whites at least
felt superior to Blacks, were the direct ancestors of those duped souls
who believe today that Black lives don't matter, and who support
Trump's economic leadership because his name is on relief checks.

Jesus wept! God save this Republic.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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