Tidal shift

Talking with our bureau chiefs the other day, I said I felt a stillness, a slack tide, out there in the body politic, where the drift of opinion seems poised to recede from the national administration.

You could say the tide that carried Trump into the White House came slack six weeks after his inauguration when the graph lines showing approval and disapproval crossed paths. Since then, his approval rating has been going down to where it stands now, right on the 40% line.

But that measure has been on a downward slope for almost a year. Something seems to be changing.

It shows the fey nimbleness of human events that it is in the part of the political forest where the man and his tribe seemed most at home, immigration, where the fairies of chance switched and flew against him. For reasons that no political analyst can fully explain, the images and deaths from Minnesota pulled a plug in the dike holding back the waters of anger.

For example, as I was writing, I checked the New York Times headlines, and internally went ‘wow’ when I saw the descending string of stories: Trump Repeals U.S. Power to Regulate Climate; Democrats Block Funding Bill as Homeland Security Shutdown Looms; Trump Administration to End Surge of Immigration Agents in Minnesota; Guard Troops Fully Withdraw From Chicago; Portland and Los Angeles; Judge Ends Deportation Case for Mexican Father of 3 U.S. Marines.

That’s close to royal flush of news against you, if you’re the folks in power.

What will tell us if there is a big shift afoot is if the Republicans get skittish.

And like, you know when, before it boils, soon-to-be bubbles gather at the bottom of a pot of salty water into which you intend to feather the dry pasta, nodules of doubt seems to be forming.

But immigration would not by itself change the tide. No, but losing the issue would kick out the strongest part of the levee holding back the waters of opinion.

A Pew Research poll released this month shows that 71% of Americans are very worried about the cost of health care, 66% about the price of food, 62% are very worried about the cost of a roof over their heads. Overall, 52% say the administration’s policies have made the economy worse.

The real question is: with those numbers, how is there not a run for the exits.

While churning the economy and chumming the water for the rich, the Trump administration, as it did before, has also laid out a feast for news folks.

I subscribe to home delivery for the two Times, the one financial and based in London and the other more general and based in New York, and the first opinion piece I look for in the latter is Maureen Dowd’s column on politics. So as a journalist I was thinking about what gives her column so much zing.

It is above all the deft simplification of concepts into everyday terms, combined with a cutting tone. I was trying to remember how she had put it in a rejoinder to Karoline Leavitt, the president’s energetic, skillful and confrontational press person — who said after Trump sent out a meme depicting the Obamas as apes, “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

I was trying to remember Dowd’s riposte.

Did she say racist and pathological, what was it? So I checked — ah, yes.

“Well, Karoline, I think Americans do care that your boss is a racist and off his rocker.”

Rather than a clinical term, rather than the spluttering outrage that overcomes most liberals in reacting to the stuff Trump does on a nearly daily basis, she chose an everyday term that had the bonus effect of echoing the “r” in racist. Off his rocker.

Well chosen words. As a result, her short column is lively, pithy, and in my case, is the first read on the opinions page.

These days, in the shifting waters of slack tide, those attacks seem to have more bite.