WSJ compares Trump's messaging to 'Baghdad Bob' propaganda

President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are in roughly the same territory as President Joe Biden’s when he was defeated in the 2024 election, a conservative columnist wrote on Monday — and Trump is at least partially to blame for that.

"So far, it's worked out well on immigration and sex, although neither the method of implementation nor the president's affect has been normal,” wrote Gerard Baker of The Wall Street Journal regarding Trump’s second term agenda and its popularity. Although Baker agreed with Trump’s anti-transgender and anti-immigrant policies, he argued that the same cannot be said of his broader economic and foreign policies. “But how are inflation and foreign entanglements working out for you?"

He later added, "No surprise then, that Mr. Trump's approval rating is almost exactly where President Biden's was."

This is not to say that Baker did not criticize Democrats. Describing America under President Joe Biden as “a radical Hollywood screenwriter's fever dream,” Baker argued Biden supported “open borders, fiscal profligacy, an inflationary surge, a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, and endless lectures on how there was no such thing as women or men." Drawing from Trump and Biden as examples, Baker wondered if either party is “ready to be normal.”

"We live in an age of radical politics, increasing polarization and a steady centrifugal momentum in both major parties,” Baker concluded. “However much independent-minded voters may want normalcy from their leaders, Republicans and Democrats seem set on their own paths, each driven by a base that is ill at ease with the old, centripetal ways."

This is not Baker’s first criticism of Trump, despite the columnist’s conservative tendencies. He previously described Trump’s invasion of Iran as “unsettling,” saying that the reality under him is that “Americans in wartime are in the unprecedented position of having to suspect that the enemy’s version of events is more likely to be true than our own. We have become Baghdad Bob.”

“Baghdad Bob” is a nickname for Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi Minister of Information during the American invasion of Iraq who would offer comically inaccurate news briefings during the Iraq War under Bush such as saying, "Baghdad is safe. The battle is still going on. Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad. Don't believe those liars.”

Speaking to this journalist for Salon Magazine in 2021, New School historian Federico Finchelstein, who specializes in the history of fascism, argued that Trump has moved the Republican Party to the right by making it explicitly fascist. Comparing Trump to Brazil’s fascist former President Jair Bolsonaro, he observed that “there are many connections because they lie in the same way.” Instead of lying in ways that are normal for politicians, to get out of a problem or spin a situation to their benefit, the Trump movement lies because “they want to change the world in order for the world to resemble those lies,” To elaborate he brought up Spain’s fascist leader Francisco Franco who was similarly fixated on “making people live those lies.” While fascists do this, it is “not typical of other political traditions.”

By contrast a critic of the Democrats’ move to the left, the late Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), told this journalist for Salon in 2018 that he feared the Democrats will become a permanent minority party if they move too far to the left.

“As much as anybody is able to predict anything in our politics these days, I believe that a strong leftward movement in the Democratic Party is a movement in the direction of defeat and minority status,” Lieberman said at the time. “This is an old story that played out over the decades. The inspirational figure of my early life was John F. Kennedy. That was true of a lot of people of my generation. To state a complicated matter simplistically, Kennedy represented what the Democratic Party was, which was progressive on domestic policy and principled and muscular on foreign and defense policy. He believed in regulatory government, but he was pro-business, he was pro-growth. I think that combination still makes a lot of sense to me.”

• george conway
• noam chomsky
• civil war
• Kayleigh mcenany
• Melania trump
• drudge report
• paul krugman
• Lindsey graham
• Lincoln project
• al franken bill maher
• People of praise
• Ivanka trump
• eric trump