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.”








