This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 1 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Donald Trump just got some terrible news. According to a new Gallup poll, the president’s approval rating is 24 points underwater. Only 36% of the country approves of him, while 60% disapprove.
When it comes to specific policies, like crime, foreign affairs, trade and his signature issue, immigration, Trump is also underwater. The same applies to his handling of the economy, the budget and health care.
Last week, Trump and the Republicans said they would have a fix for the disaster they have created on health insurance premiums. But then they got shy and unveiled precisely nothing on the subject.
It’s been a week now, and still nothing. Tens of millions of Americans are going to see their health insurance costs spike through the roof at the end of the month, and Trump still apparently has no plan at all for how to fix that.
Monday marked World AIDS Day, a day when people remember the millions killed by the HIV/AIDS pandemic and renew efforts to fight it. However, the Trump administration decided this year that the United States would no longer observe World AIDS Day at all.
Presumably, that’s because it has gutted America’s programs to fight AIDS, including the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the bipartisan George W. Bush-era program known as PEPFAR that has provided HIV treatment to people who can’t afford it, a program that has literally saved millions of lives.
On Monday, ACT UP Philadelphia, Health GAP and other groups shut down traffic near the White House to make clear that the American people aren’t going to go quietly on this.
Nobody’s being quiet right now. Usually, around Thanksgiving and the start of the holiday season — the start of the real cold weather — you expect things to chill out a little bit, but that hasn’t been the case.
On Saturday in New York City, a crowd of protesters confronted federal agents in downtown Manhattan outside a parking garage, reportedly foiling an immigration raid. The Wall Street Journal reported that many of the people who joined that demonstration were passersby who weren’t setting out to protest that day but jumped right in when they saw it was Trump’s immigration agents in their city.
One advocate at the scene described it as “organic,” telling the Journal: “New Yorkers saw what was happening and started to rally. People are stepping up to defend one another.”
In New Orleans, residents lined up to buy out a beloved local taqueria in the city, Taqueria Guerrero, after it said it would close to protect its customers and staff until Trump’s agents are gone.
The Cincinnati Enquirer just profiled a very different kind of pushback. In Butler County, Ohio, where Trump won last year with 62% of the vote, a group “almost 70 strong shows up weekly to commissioner meetings in this conservative Ohio county to protest local officials’ agreement” with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
As the Enquirer reports, the group protesting is “mostly grandmas.” Why are they such an older group? Well, one founding member of Butler County for Immigrant Justice told the paper that it’s because the county commissioners hold their meetings at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesdays. Who’s available to protest every Tuesday at 9:30 a.m.? Retirees, that’s who. Anne Jantzen, an 82-year-old from Seven Mile, Ohio, told the Enquirer: “I can do it; therefore I need to.”
In Indiana, protesters turned up at the statehouse to urge Republicans not to go along with Trump’s demands that they redraw the state’s congressional maps to take away Democratic seats.
After the president this weekend used a disgusting slur for developmentally disabled people as an insult, he lost one key Republican vote on those maps. State Sen. Michael Bohacek, who has a daughter with Down syndrome, wrote in a post on Facebook: “This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences. I will be voting NO on redistricting.”
Across the country, we saw protests against Home Depot, with Americans demanding the company stop letting its stores and parking lots be used by ICE agents. There were also more protests targeting Avelo Airlines, which flies deportation flights for ICE. At Albany International Airport in New York, where it was very cold, people brought chains to show what it’s like for Avelo to have people chained up on a deportation flight and then try to sell you that same seat on that same plane for its next flight. An Apple Store in Portland, Oregon, got a Black Friday picket and protest because that company has caved to the Trump administration’s demands that it take down apps that people have made to warn one another about where ICE operations are happening. Economic boycotts can often have a much more immediate and lasting effect than typical political protest actions. We know this from our country’s history. Monday marked 70 years since Rosa Parks refused a bus driver’s order to get up from her seat so a white person could take it. That was the start of the Montgomery bus boycott. Less than a week after she was taken into custody, more than 5,000 people attended the first mass meeting to plan a boycott of the bus system. The boycott went on for 382 long days. That act of economic protest, and logistical and economic sacrifice by African Americans in Alabama, forced a change — public bus segregation was ruled unconstitutional. As Americans, that’s not just something to be impressed by or something to learn by heart at school; that’s our moral foundation. That’s our strategic inheritance. We can learn from Americans who have gone before us and fought against long odds to stop our government from doing terrible things. When this administration’s actions are inexplicable and mad in equal measure, it’s worth remembering that this guy is profoundly, deeply, wildly unpopular in this country. It’s clear the people of the United States do not like what he is doing, and they are not buying what he is selling. It’s also worth remembering what we have inherited in this country: a rich, deep and fairly badass tradition of putting a stop to it, whether that comes from boycotting, protesting, showing up at every meeting or discovering the truth and holding wrongdoers accountable — beating them in the end, so they’re ashamed to ever admit what they did and so their best hope is that history forgets them. Allison Detzel contributed.
Rachel Maddow
Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award-winning “The Rachel Maddow Show” Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on MS NOW. “The Rachel Maddow Show” features Maddow’s take on the biggest stories of the day, political and otherwise, including in-depth analysis and stories no other shows in cable news will cover.
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