A defining characteristic of the Trump era is liberals, along with some Republicans, and their obsession with the approval of people who don’t matter.
CNN’s Don Lemon and his guests perfectly demonstrated this tendency Monday night, gleefully observing that President Trump is less popular in the United Kingdom than is former President Barack Obama.
“For our allies, Barack Obama is still the president,” said the Nation correspondent Joan Walsh as Lemon giggled along. “And they are just waiting for us — they want to wake up from this nightmare, they’re waiting for us to wake up from this nightmare and they don’t want to acknowledge the real president. So [Obama] is the president permanently until we have another normal person.”
CNN’s Tara Setmayer said, “I want him to be president again. I’ll take him back in a heartbeat.”
Her colleague Keith Boykin chimed in that it was “ridiculous that we have a president that is so despised everywhere across the planet and we should be better than this. But we’re not, unfortunately.”
The entire segment could be summed up as: Please like us, British people! We want you to think we’re cool again!
A YouGov survey in April found that just 21% of Britains have a positive opinion of Trump, while approval of Obama was 72%.
This should surprise precisely no one. Obama during his tenure kept Europe comfortable, never asking that any of our allies do anything, like meet their bare minimum responsibility to NATO, as Trump has. Obama instead pledged via the Paris Accord that the United States would hamstring its own economy to the benefit of every other nation.
The Paris deal boiled down to nearly 200 countries setting up their own individual rules to curb carbon emission. That included countries, such as India, receiving billions in foreign aid from more developed economies and other countries, such as China, doing less to curb emissions and at a slower pace to fulfill their own end of the agreement.
How odd that Obama’s sky-high approval rating would coincide with his effort to reduce the U.S. in a way that would allow every other country — our competitors — a boost.
Our feelings might suffer from the tut-tutting of our European friends but at least our indoor heating still works.
Hey, I wonder if Tom Brady lies awake at night concerned about his approval ratings from Joe Flacco, Matthew Stafford, and Aaron Rodgers. Maybe he’ll screw up the Patriots at the next Super Bowl just so they’ll say nice things about him.
