President Donald Trump’s job approval rating has risen to 49%, his highest in Gallup polling since he took office in 2017.
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His 94% approval rating among Republicans is up six percentage points from early January and is three points higher than his previous best among his fellow partisans [what does that phrase even mean?]. The 42% approval rating among independents is up five points, and ties three other polls as his best among that group. Democratic approval is 7%, down slightly from 10%.
In addition to possibly reflecting sentiment regarding his impeachment, Trump’s increased approval rating may also result from other issues, including:
According to the Gallup link, Americans weren’t actually asked about „the recent military action in Iran“, but rather „the recent military action the United States took that resulted in the death of an Iranian military general“. What constitutes a „military action“? A drone firing a missile? What about one soldier firing a rifle? When does an assassination become a military action? Was this an Iranian military general as opposed to an Iranian civilian general?
For years I’ve been amused by acquaintances eternally „healing their souls“ with various New Age charlatans and gibberish. Without a baseline soul to compare to, how can one know one’s soul has been damaged? How could one know when this soul has been „healed“? These people see themselves as, or claim they see themselves as, attempting to return something imaginary to a state they have not witnessed and cannot test for.
I realize I have been practicing a similar rhetorical fallacy in using words like „surreal“ to describe American society. Surrealism connotes an arranging of images in a way the viewer recognizes as intentionally orthagonal to their notion of reality. Surrealism is therefore utterly dependent on a reality recognized by both artist and viewer. Without such a shared real, how can there be a surreal?
